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Heart of the Angel

Molly Dineen’s wry, humorous and sometimes touching look at the trials faced by the staff and passengers of London’s dishearteningly dilapidated Angel tube station, before its modernisation.

Documentary 1989 40 mins Not rated

Director: Molly Dineen

CC

Overview

The daily – and nightly - lives of workers at London’s Angel Underground station are captured in this behind-the-scenes documentary from filmmaker Molly Dineen. Profiling life in one of London’s busiest underground stations, this account of staff’s struggles to cope with the great British travelling public is filled with humour and pathos.

Heart of the Angel was Dineen's third and final film for the BBC2s 40 Minutes strand and, unlike Home from the Hill and My African Farm, the film does not follow a single character but rather offers a portrait of a station (on the brink of collapse) seen through the eyes of a small number of its employees. Since it was filmed in 1989, the redevelopment plans discussed in the film have been carried out and the station has been comprehensively rebuilt, with new platforms and the longest escalators on the London Underground system. Heart of the Angel is included on BFI's three-volume compilation of the director's work, the Molly Dineen Collection.

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