Dialogue Book Lounge and Fane Online present A Night In with Niven Govinden, to mark the publication of A Diary of a Film.

The event will initially be broadcast on 17 April 2021 at 6.30pm UK time. It will be available to view up to a week after the event has ended and can be accessed worldwide. If you live in a time zone that does not suit the initial broadcast time, you can watch it at any point after the initial showing for one week.

If you have any questions, please email [email protected]

An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film.

Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city's secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film.

Join Niven Govinden to celebrate the publication of his new book, A Diary of a Film: a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love; it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers. In conversation for this event, Niven will consider how his writing gets to the heart of what it is to live an artistic life caught in the never-present of the piece just made and the piece as yet uncreated. He’ll touch on art making, obsession and responsibility, how art ravages and redeems, and the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one’s satisfaction.
From the comfort of your home, let Niven whisk you away to the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival for an evening that feels like an elegy to a just-gone era.

'A true force of fierceness and beauty' OLIVIA LAING