Arena — Season 1, Episode 99: Episode 99
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Last Saturday in the Francois Truffaut Season now running on BBC2, "L'Enfant Sauvage", one of his masterpieces, was shown. Set in 18th-century France it is about the attempts of a man of science to civilise a young boy brought up without parents in the wild. Gavin Millar talked to Francois Truffaut when the film was first released here in 1970. From his first film, "The Four Hundred Blows", which looks affectionately at the making of a young delinquent, to "Small Change", made a couple of years ago, his films have often had children at their centre. Gavin Millar also talks to Bill Douglas whose recently completed trilogy about a poor Scottish childhood, "My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home", is regarded by many as the most important contribution to the British cinema for years.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.