Espresso martinis, Greek charcuterie, and a fight: inside my surreal 4 a.m. screening of 'The Odyssey'

Demand for 'The Odyssey' in Imax 70mm is so high that the BFI Imax in London is screening it through the night.

Georgia Hennessy

There's no good time to discover you've misread your cinema ticket, but 3:20 a.m. on a Saturday outside the Imax in central London is a particularly bad one.The film began at 4:15 a.m., not 4 a.m., as I'd previously thought. Those were 15 minutes of sleep I'd never get back, on top of the meager five hours my partner and I had managed before I dragged us across the city in the dark."The Odyssey," Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic, is the first feature ever shot entirely on Imax film cameras. Only 41 cinemas worldwide can project it as intended, in full 1.43:1 aspect ratio on a 70mm Imax screen.Three of those are in the UK, and the British Film Institute's Imax, home to Britain's biggest screen, is one of them. Hence the round-the-clock screenings, and hence, us, awake before the birds.

London's BFI Imax, home to Britain's biggest screen, in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Georgia Hennessy