Season Introduction Talk + World Premiere: Learning the Ropes

+ onstage Q&A with director Ryan Pickard and former World Middleweight Champion Darren Barker

An intimate and deeply moving documentary about Bethnal Green’s legendary Repton Boxing Club.

Unfortunately, Ray Winstone will no longer to be able to join the Q&A.

  • Director

    Ryan Pickard

  • UK 2025. 49min. Total running time 110min

  • Digital

Repton Boxing Club is recognised as one of the most famous amateur boxing clubs in the world. Through its candid portrait of Tony Burns, the club’s legendary former head coach of 60 years, captured before his death in 2021, Learning the Ropes presents a singular account of his impact upon the institution’s boxers past and present. It also explores the role of the amateur boxing club as a means of understanding social and community life and, on a wider level, the human condition. Before the screening, curator Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka will contextualise the films in this season and the relationship between boxing and cinema.

Contains homophobic language.