Control

Anton Corbijn's Control opened in 2007 and won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes Director's Fortnight, alongside multiple BAFTA nominations including Outstanding British Film. The film was Corbijn's debut feature; the Dutch photographer had previously been one of the most internationally important rock-music portrait photographers of the 1980s and 1990s, including for Joy Division and the broader Manchester scene the film depicts. Corbijn's first photographs of the band were taken in 1979.

The film follows the short life of Ian Curtis (Sam Riley, in a star-making lead performance), the lead singer of Joy Division, from his early years in Macclesfield through his marriage to Deborah (Samantha Morton), the band's formation in Manchester after the Sex Pistols' 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall concert, the affair with the Belgian journalist Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), and Curtis's worsening epilepsy in the year before his death in May 1980 at age twenty-three. Joe Anderson plays bassist Peter Hook; James Anthony Pearson plays guitarist Bernard Sumner; Toby Kebbell plays manager Rob Gretton.

The film is shot in stark high-contrast black-and-white by Martin Ruhe, in a register directly drawn from Corbijn's own period photography of the band. Riley performs Joy Division's songs himself, on the actual stage of the Manchester Apollo and other period venues. Adapted from Deborah Curtis's 1995 memoir Touching from a Distance (Deborah is credited as co-producer), the film operates simultaneously as music biopic, regional period drama, and meditation on the cost of a creative life lived under epilepsy and the therapeutic regimes available in the late 1970s.