Ben Hopkins (born 1969) is a British

film director A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, p ...

screenwriter A screenplay writer (also called screenwriter, scriptwriter, scribe or scenarist) is a writer who practices the craft of screenwriting, writing screenplays on which mass media, such as films, television programs and video games, are based. ...

and novelist. His film ''

Simon Magus Simon Magus (Greek Σίμων ὁ μάγος, Latin: Simon Magus), also known as Simon the Sorcerer or Simon the Magician, was a religious figure whose confrontation with Peter is recorded in Acts . The act of simony, or paying for position, is ...

'' entered the 49th Berlin International Film Festival competition in 1999. His 2008 film, '' The Market: A Tale of Trade'' ( tr, Pazar: Bir Ticaret Masalı) won awards at film festivals in Locarno, Ghent and Antalya, where it was the first film directed by a foreigner to win an award in the national competition. In 2021, Ben Hopkins wrote a novel called Cathedral. David Wiley in a review on the Rain Taxi, writes that Hopkins as a screenwriter and filmmaker, Hopkins also employs far more filmic allusions than literary ones, such as stone facedly referencing Monty Python at two very unfunny moments and making a few glancing nods toward The Princess Bride, another work of a great screenwriter/novelist. Nicknaming his jejune stonecutter “Rettich” and placing great stress on the association with the word radish, Hopkins almost certainly invokes the celebrated Chartres scene in F for Fake, during which Welles mistily refers to the contemporary human as a “poor forked radish,” an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s riff on Falstaff’s description of Robert Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2. That’s quite a thread of association from film to architecture to literature, and Hopkins dispenses with that thread on the novel’s first page. Otherwise largely literature free in its associative language and aesthetic order, this brilliantly imagined, gorgeously designed, and deeply profound novel is nonetheless a magnificent work of literature itself. His other notable films include '' Lost in Karastan'', written with

Paweł Pawlikowski Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski (; born 15 September 1957) is a Polish filmmaker. He garnered early praise for a string of documentaries in the 1990s and for his award-winning feature films of the 2000s, '' Last Resort'' (2000) and ''My Summer of ...

, and ''

Inside Inside may refer to: * Insider, a member of any group of people of limited number and generally restricted access Film * ''Inside'' (1996 film), an American television film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Eric Stoltz * ''Inside'' (2002 f ...

'', starring

Willem Dafoe Willem James Dafoe (; born July 22, 1955) is an American actor. He is the recipient of List of awards and nominations received by Willem Dafoe, various accolades, including the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, in addition to receiving nominations for ...

Selected filmography

* ''

'' (1999) * ''

The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz ''The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz'' is a 2000 Anglo-German black and white surreal comedy. It has been described as an "avant-garde comedy about the Apocalypse", co-written and directed by Ben Hopkins. Premise On the last day of creation, a stran ...

'' (2000) * '' The Market: A Tale of Trade'' (2008) * '' Lost in Karastan'' (2014) * ''

'' (2023, writer)

Bibliography (selection)

* ''Cathedral: a novel'' (2021)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Ben 1969 births Living people British film directors British male screenwriters