Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 5450 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| CHRISTMAS STORY | 1950 | 1950-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 4 mins 18 secs Credits: Alan Sidi Subject: Family Life |
| Summary This is a film made by Leeds amateur filmmaker Alan Sidi, showing a typical family Christmas in the Sidi household. This one shows the family at their home in Leeds, Val D’or, including Alan’s future wife Kay. |
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Description
This is a film made by Leeds amateur filmmaker Alan Sidi, showing a typical family Christmas in the Sidi household. This one shows the family at their home in Leeds, Val D’or, including Alan’s future wife Kay.
The film begins showing a model of a typical Christmas scene. Then someone dressed as Santa descends the stairs and places presents underneath the Christmas tree. Christmas cards are displayed on a side table where a girl is sleeping in bed surrounded by presents. She wakes and...
This is a film made by Leeds amateur filmmaker Alan Sidi, showing a typical family Christmas in the Sidi household. This one shows the family at their home in Leeds, Val D’or, including Alan’s future wife Kay.
The film begins showing a model of a typical Christmas scene. Then someone dressed as Santa descends the stairs and places presents underneath the Christmas tree. Christmas cards are displayed on a side table where a girl is sleeping in bed surrounded by presents. She wakes and takes a few downstairs and places them under the tree, and looks at some of the other presents. A woman takes the turkey from out of the oven and carries it into the dining room, where Mrs Sidi carves it. She is then seen dishing out the Christmas pudding. The family are then seen in their party hats and blowing party horns. A servant pours out champagne as they sit around the dining table and pull Christmas crackers, and the film ends again showing the Christmas model.
The End.
Context
Leeds maverick amateur filmmaker and inventor Alan Sidi gets behind the camera aged just 19 in this typical Christmas for a reasonably well-off family in Leeds in 1950. A girl awakes to find presents on her bed and more under the Christmas tree delivered by Santa. And despite the continued meat rationing, the traditional turkey is served to the guests in their party hats, as is champagne by the family servant as they all blow party horns.
Alan Sidi was a man of ideas and invention, both...
Leeds maverick amateur filmmaker and inventor Alan Sidi gets behind the camera aged just 19 in this typical Christmas for a reasonably well-off family in Leeds in 1950. A girl awakes to find presents on her bed and more under the Christmas tree delivered by Santa. And despite the continued meat rationing, the traditional turkey is served to the guests in their party hats, as is champagne by the family servant as they all blow party horns.
Alan Sidi was a man of ideas and invention, both comic and technological, for Leeds Mercury Movie Makers in the 1960s. He was making films even at school in the 1940s and went on to make many family films and travelogues in the 1970s. His invention of a cine-sync machine in the 1960s enabled audio to be synchronised with, and then added to, 16mm film. Both of Alan’s parents were immigrants, his father, a Turkish Jew, who himself invented a machine to weave mohair (hence the family’s relative prosperity), and his mother Mica, another maker of films, who hailed from Paris. Also to be seen is Alan’s future wife Kay, another immigrant, recently arrived from Ireland to commence a career in nursing. |
