Brian who goes to the cinema every night for 30 years  and lives in a small flat in Kentish Town Road, north London, works in the business rates department of Camden Council and eats lunch at the same  Castelletto café at 2:!5pm every day. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine.

After leaving the council offices,  he goes to British Film Institute on London’s South Bank where, alongside a small community of oddballs, he watches the works of classic and contemporary cinema.  He catalogues his responses to each film and lives by a unique mantra  “keep watch, stick to routine, Protect against surprise”. Through the works of Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Guney, and others Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender  meditation on friendship and the importance of community.

 Brain born in Northern Ireland, his mother is dead and he does not see his father and brother. “Estranged for decades from his family, Brain had transferred his emotional loyalties to individual directors of film” writes Cooper, an art historian as well as a novelist. Brian also explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Cineastes will enjoy Brian’s accessible and entertaining discourses on cinema and many readers will know the more mainstream films like Reservoir Dogs, We Need to Talk about Kevin, The Big Lebowski, that he critiques in his notebook.  He also recalls the Iraq War and the London Bombings of 2005.

Towards the end Brian spots a homeless woman on the South Bank. “He and the other buffs were her,  Brian painly saw, were it not for the sanctuary of film” . Brian by Jeremy Cooper, Fitzcarraldo Editions