Matthew Bourne films make festive download and streaming debut 🎄
24th November 2025
We are thrilled to announce that Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker! and Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty have arrived – just in time for Christmas. Both spectacular films are now available to download or streaming from our Film Shop – what better time to start planning your festive viewing!
Filmed live on stage in 2022, this latest version of New Adventures’ beloved classic bursts with Bourne’s signature wit, emotion, and magical fantasy. Inspired by the golden-age Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, Clara’s bittersweet journey sweeps you from a bleak Christmas Eve in Dr. Dross’s Orphanage through a shimmering winter wonderland and into the irresistible, sugar-coated candy kingdon of Sweetieland.
Captured live in 2023 to mark its 10th anniversary at Sadler’s Wells – where it famously became the company’s fastest-selling production – Sleeping Beauty casts a spell of gothic beauty and supernatural romance. With fairies, vampires, and a battle between good and evil turned delightfully on its head, this reimagined tale proves that true love can outlast even the limits of time.
Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes will be back at Sadler’s Wells stage for Christmas 2025. Our 2020 film captures the most recent live performance of Hans Christian Andersen’s haunting tale of obsession, possession, and one girl’s dream to be the greatest dancer in the world. Set to the achingly romantic music of golden-age Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann, Victoria Page lives to dance, but her ambitions become a battleground between the two men who inspire her passion: the composer Julian Craster and legendary impresario Boris Lermontov, each demanding her devotion.
Head to our Shop to browse our curated collection of arts, performance and visual arts films – all available for streaming or download anytime.
Robert Vas in Context – update
22nd September 2025
John Wyver writes: With James Jordan and Eleni Liarou, I am one of the organisers of this symposium next March, and I am pleased to share the details here. Please note that we have had to re-schedule the date, and we have extended the deadline for this CFP.
Call for Proposals: Robert Vas in Context
A one-day symposium and screening of Nine Days in ’26, Robert Vas’ film about the May 1926 General Strike
Note change of date: Friday 27 March 2026, Birkbeck, University of London
Proposals are invited for 20-minute presentations for a symposium about the films of Robert Vas and about distinctive documentary engagements with the themes that drove his work: refugee experience, Jewish culture, the film archive, memory and history.
Watch Swan Lake to celebrate 30th anniversary tour
7th April 2025
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures is staging a bold revival ofSwan Lake, Tchaikovsky’s stunning masterpiece which premiered almost 30 years ago and which has become the most successful dance theatre production of all time. Swan Lake is touring across 19 venues over 29 weeks this year in celebration of its first staging at Sadler’s Wells in 1995, this time featuring a brand new generation of dancers.
Matthew Bourne’s thrilling, bold, witty and emotive genre-defining production is still best known for replacing the female corps-de-ballet with a menacing male ensemble, which has shattered convention and turned tradition on its head.
Illuminations filmed the fabulous 2020 reimagining of the show for Sky Arts and at present our film remains the most recent and contemporary Swan Lake available. It is the only production you can stream or download if you have missed the current live show, or if you saw it, loved it, and need a reminder!
Of the new show, Matthew Bourne said, “As our swans take flight once more in this major revival, I’m full of anticipation for the challenges it will bring for our next generation of dancers and the wonder that it will bring to audiences who will experience it for the very first time”.
Since taking the dance world by storm, Swan Lake has become the longest running dance classic in London’s West End and on Broadway, and has been performed across the globe winning major international accolades.
5 December 2023: The last few months have seen lots of changes at Illuminations, and we are now finally bringing our website up-to-date to reflect these. In brief, it has become increasingly hard, indeed seemingly impossible, to secure broadcast commissions for the kind of interesting and distinctive productions that we have been known for, and as a consequence we have taken the decision to scale back our operations, move out of our office in Highbury, and to concentrate on aspects of our distribution operation. Although we are exploring options to continue selling the most popular of our DVDs, we have discontinued the physical media of many titles. Our digital options from this site for both download and rental remain unaffected.
The return of Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet
20th June 2023
After dazzling audiences when it was first staged in 2019, Romeo + Juliet comes back to the stage for four months from July 2023, establishing itself firmly within the New Adventures repertoire alongside the very best of Bourne’s world-renowned dance theatre productions.
Shakespeare’s timeless story of forbidden love is told with a scintillating injection of raw passion and youthful vitality. Confined against their will by a society that seeks to divide them, Shakespeare’s two young lovers must follow their hearts as they risk everything to be together.
Matthew Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet is a masterful re-telling of an ageless tale of teenage discovery and the madness of first love.
Illuminations released the fabulous screen version in 2020 and the film is available as a DVD, with extras, or for streaming and download here. If you don’t get to see the stage show, our film is a perfect antidote. Better still, why not buy our Matthew Bourne Collection boxset which features this film and 4 other sumptuous stage-to-screen performances, including the indomitable Swan Lake?
50% off arts and culture DVDs!
20th April 2023
As demand for digital content grows, we are reducing our range of arts and culture DVDs. We are giving you the fantastic opportunity to purchase some of our wonderful films at a cracking 50% discount while stocks last.
As seen on TV!
These are an exciting collection of feature films and documentaries that have been produced for broadcasters such as the BBC, Channel 4, and Sky Arts. BUY these films here.
Exhibitions and Collections
These films have been made in support of a specific exhibition or collection at important institutions, galleries, and museums in the UK, including Tate, National Portrait Gallery and V&A. Artworks featured include sculptures, paintings, artifacts, and installations from around the world. BUY these films here.
BUY theEYE
Our best-selling series of 44 profiles about contemporary artists offers a rare insight into their influences and ideas, providing an accessible means of engaging with the pleasures and puzzles of art in the 21st century. BUY these films here.
The Art of …
A series of 50-minute documentaries exploring the lives and works of exceptional and influential 20th Century artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Frances Bacon. Newly-filmed artworks are accompanied by a specially recorded soundtrack drawn solely from the artist’s interviews, letters, and writings. BUY these films here.
Art Lives
A powerful and arresting series of documentaries on DVD about artists and art movements. The work of these artists lives on through its influence on the art world at large. Films include Hockney, Warhol, Degas, Manet, Velasquez, Frida Kahlo, Vermeer, and Pollock. BUY these films here.
Art21
An award-winning series of 24 DVDs in which 100 contemporary artists explain their work, their creative processes, and their perceptions of art. Organised by specific themes and including intimate footage, they allow the viewer to observe the artists at work and watch their process as they transform inspiration into art. BUY these films here.
Masterworks
These art documentaries focus on art movements, periods, and galleries around the world. Each DVD contains 5 films, with an accompanying short film highlighting a single work of art. Artists include Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Josef Albers, Kazimir Malevich, and Franz Marc. BUY these films here.
Architectures
An exciting series presenting a privileged and unprecedented look at the work of superstar architects and some of their most brilliant creations. The films offer a unique and instructive insight into the greatest architectural achievements of our times. BUY these films here.
Johannes Vermeer documentary
24th February 2023
The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam has pulled off the unthinkable, mounting an exhibition of almost all of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings. The exceptional nature of the show was not lost on art lovers, with every single ticket being sold out before opening. For those feeling they’ve missed out on this genuinely once in a life time opportunity, we would like to point you in the direction of our excellent film on Jan Vermeer.
In the film, Michael Gill delves into the master’s world and talks about the camera obscura and Vermeer’s interest in science and cartography. Together with experts, he explores Vermeer’s secrets of perspective, space, allegory and symbolic relationships in his works.
Very little is known about Vermeer himself. There are no diary entries, writing, or letters that have survived. Vermeer was hardly recognised during his lifetime, and cemented his outsider status when he married by converting to Catholicism in a mostly Protestant country. To paraphrase Heidegger, he lived, he painted, he died.
With only 34, possibly 35, paintings in existence, attempting, to assemble them all in one place has proved difficult. Due to their fragility and value, galleries have long been resistant to loaning the Dutch Master’s paintings. This exhibition pulls work that is owned by the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, Dublin’s National Gallery, with other works coming from as far a field as New York and Tokyo.
The exhibition a the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam runs from the 10th February – 4th June. Our film, Jan Vermeer, is available here.
Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns out now!
8th December 2022
We are incredibly excited to announce the release of Hofesh Shecter’s Clowns, now available to download or stream from our Film Shop. Since it was originally broadcast on the BBC in 2018 as part of the Performance Live series, we have received many comments and requests on our website and YouTube channel for us to release this powerful performance piece. We’re very happy to be bringing this unique work to your screens just in time for Christmas.
Clowns is a dance film that is a macabre comedy of murder and desire, asking how far will we go in the name of entertainment. Directed, choreographed, and composed by Hofesh Shechter, Clowns is reimagined for the first time on screen in a film that combines bold, exhilarating, and tribal movements by ten dancers with a percussive, cinematic score. The 30-minute film, shot on location at the iconic Rivoli Ballroom in South London, is unlike anything audiences will have seen before.
Included in the download price is the performance alongside a short introduction by Ore Oduba. This was shown as part of the original broadcast on the BBC and helps to give context to the extraordinary dance piece.
20th Anniversary of London Orbital
4th November 2022
https://www.deepermovieschannel.com/We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of London Orbital by releasing the film digitally alongside a new interview with filmmakers, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. This release is in partnership with the newly launched Deeper Movies Channel, a new TVOD platform that launches on 4th November 2022 using filmmakers as curators in residence.
An extraordinary and visionary film released in 2002 produced in conjunction with Iain Sinclair’s acclaimed book documenting his year-long journey around the M25 motorway on foot. The newly filmed interviews reveal Sinclair and Petit discussing the impact of London Orbital and its lasting appeal; how it fits into the new media landscape and its relevance for today. The interview is only available digitally from our website or from Deeper Movies Channel.
London Orbital blends and blurs fiction and non-fiction in its psycho-geographic journey. It is a road movie and a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past. The M25 serves primarily as a metaphor as Petit and Sinclair capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving around it provokes. Their narratives are filled with musings and observations that their archaeological journey digs up in an attempt to write the history of a place that resists historicity.
Two decades after its release, the film is something of a time capsule for us. Released soon after 9/11 and Afghanistan, and months before the second Iraq War, the film’s hangover of “the end of history” looms large. In our current historical moment, this can feel anachronistic.
And yet, though the M25 might be circular, history is not. Petit and Sinclair’s narration situates their film and by extension, us. Twenty years later London Orbitalreveals a transitory state: the legacy of Thatcherism with stories of entrepreneurial men in the guise of Essex gangsters and covert arms deals with Pinochet and privatisation, versus the rise of the War on Terror and the emergence of mass surveillance.
We’re delighted to announce that Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker! is releasing in the UK and internationally on the 15th and 20th of November. As part of our ongoing screen partnership with New Adventures, we filmed Nutcracker! at Sadler’s Wells in early 2022. A DVD and digital release will be available in the new year. Sign up for our newsletter here to receive updates.
This is the 30th anniversary of this much-loved Matthew Bourne production, which is being released in cinemas for the first time. The film stars Cordelia Braithwaite as ‘Clara’, Harrison Dowzell as ‘Nutcracker’, Ashley Shaw as ‘Sugar’, and Dominic North as ‘Fritz’. For the latest information on participating cinemas please visit NutcrackerCinema.com.
