See you all in September

So, sadly, our club year has come to an end once more. We hope you all enjoyed at least some of the films you saw, and we look forward to seeing you again next season. It will be the club’s TWENTIETH YEAR so we would like to mark it with some celebrations, at both the club and the festival. This will not only be fun for us all, but maybe a time to put the name of the club around and spread the word; we still need to try to build our audiences to keep us viable. If you have any suggestions of what we could do, please let us know – special films, parties, guests, events..? What would you like to see? What would make the year special for you?

Another reminder to anyone who has yet to reply to our emails that we will have to remove you from the club records if we don’t receive an ‘opt-in’ from you to let us keep your records and send you info; if you haven’t replied yet, PLEASE do it now.

You might like to know a few stats for the year.  Our biggest audience was 170 for ‘A Man Called Ove’, whilst the highest scoring film was ‘Land of Mine’ – 90.96%. Our lowest audience was 61 at Rheged for ‘The Graduate’ (obviously old classics don’t turn you on!) though, not surprisingly I guess, those that did turn up loved it – 90.76%. Overall the average audience was just over 101 – slightly up from 99 last year...so keep bringing your friends along please!

Over the summer we will be swapping over our emails to a more professional, glamorous look which we hope you will like; you will, of course, have to opt-in to get them!

Meantime, we wish you all a very happy, warm summer. Enjoy the long evenings and, when you miss our Sunday nights together, don’t forget the Alhambra keeps going all the year round; it is easy to see what is on – just look at the Alhambra website.

See you there AND in September for our 20th Year!!

Boy - Sunday 25th March 5pm

Sadly, we come to our last film of the year, this Sunday at 5.00. We are showing the Kiwi Boy... "a charmer, a funny and affecting coming-of-age story rendered with heart, and with nuttiness"  - so says Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer. My son (who still lives in New Zealand), recommended it to me when it was first released in 2010; we couldn’t get it then, but I can vouch for it too as I did get the DVD a couple of years later. The film has finally been released here after the success of Hunt for the Wilderpeople by the same Director – Taika Waititi. As ‘the Wilderpeople’ went down so well in Keswick, we thought we’d finish the season on a bright, whimsical note (just to disprove to all those of you who think all our films are depressing!!). The story follows the Maori ‘Boy’ in his poor, backwater life near the Bay of Plenty in 1984 New Zealand. We get to see the joy and the sorrow of unemployed Maori life, whilst following Boy’s dreams about his ‘famous’ father (Played for comic effect by Waititi himself) – is he really a deep-sea diver? Come along for some traditional Maori lifestyle...and lots of laughs!

Strangled - Sunday 18th March 5pm

Strangled is a drama, based on real-life events, in which a series of sexual murders take place in a small Hungarian town. Set initially just after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 a suspect is quickly convicted and imprisoned. However ten years later it becomes clear to the original detective and the prosecutor that this a serial killing (despite being told "there are no serial killers in Hungary"). Reopening the case involves admitting that Soviet era justice was fallible and that is not politically acceptable…

Winner of nine Hungarian film awards last year.

My Pure Land - Sunday 11th March 5pm

We have been looking forward to the film this Sunday at 5.00 - the fascinating-looking Pakistani feminist western My Pure Land... "One of Britain's irregular submissions in the foreign-language film Oscar category, My Pure Land is a tense siege thriller shot in Pakistan with dialogue in Urdu. British-Pakistani writer-director Sarmad Masud's feature debut dramatizes the true story of a Nazo Dharejo, a teenage girl who took up arms to defend her rural family homestead against an army of gunmen." – Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter.

With a backdrop of the huge problems faced by women in this patriarchal society, the resulting film becomes "heart-poundingly tense and strikingly feminist" – Ed Potton, Times – which would be pretty good for a UK film, never mind one made in Pakistan. We hope this appeals to you as much as it does to us!

Loveless - Sunday 4th March 5pm

Loveless is the story of an unloved Russian boy Alexey, neither of whose unlikeable separating parents want to take him with them and who disappears one day. Most of the film is the sometimes desultory search the couple make for their son, the disinterest of the police and the volunteer group who take up the search. It is shot in muted colours with a background of unremittingly bad national news. We shouldn’t assume that views in one film are relevant to all of Russian society, but there is an undercurrent of unconcern – just another missing child. Don’t let that put you off – it is a mesmerising film that won the Jury prize at Cannes and best film at the London Film Festival last year and was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.