Summer comes to Keswick!

It seems very appropriate that the weather is so lovely at the moment; we can all go outside and enjoy it while there are no club movies to see! We hope you have enjoyed the year; we feel that it was a good one with some great films, and certainly a fantastic 25th Film Festival last month. 

Many of the films went on to win BAFTAs or even Oscars and many more appeared in the BFI's best films of the year list. It is also a good sign that so many club-type films are now winning awards worldwide.

Thanks to everyone who has helped keep the show running over the year, whether you were on the committee, running front of house, running the Festival or helping on it. An especial thanks to Ian Payne for directing all the great festivals we have had in his time and to Julia Vickers for stepping forward to run the next ones! A special thanks should go the Rennie family for all their years giving the club a home, and to Jonathan and Graham for taking on the responsibility for our future. Thanks all!

So that is it from us. The emails will be back in mid summer with a list of films for next season for members to choose from, and the Sunday night shows will start again in September.  If you are looking for something to see meantime, keep your eye on the Alhambra website - they  will keep showing films for you every week. 

Have a great summer, everyone! 

The Room Next Door - Sunday 30th March 5pm

For our final film before our summer break we have The Room Next Door. Pedro Almodóvar's first English language film and the Best Film winner at the Venice Film Festival. Tilda Swinton's Martha is dying of cancer. She asks her old friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be in 'the room next door' when she stops the pain by self-euthanising - in the next room to prevent Ingrid from becoming a criminal.

"It’s an elegant film, reckoning empathetically with an extremely complex topic" -  Little White Lies 

The Last Dance - Sunday 23rd March 5pm

The Last Dance is another Members' Choice; Hong Kong wedding planner Dominic loses his business due to Covid and switches to running a funeral business. It is actually going quite well except that his business partner is an old-school Taoist priest Master Man, who has no time for his new commercially oriented youngster.

“Starts out as an odd couple story but evolves into something more complex and satisfying: a film about tradition, gender roles and family tensions.” - Wendy Ide, Observer

The Girl With The Needle - Sunday 16th March 5pm

When we have got over the buzz from such a great weekend at the festival, Keswick Film Club continues this Sunday with The Girl with the Needle. Set in Denmark in the post-world war one 1920s, this is based on a true story and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. 

"It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder" – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.

Film Festival Review

What a great weekend of films! Over 3000 seats were sold (the best since the pandemic) to watch a choice of over 40 films; even showing some of these twice, the Alhambra Screen One was totally sold out five times, whilst screen Two was filled eight times! There were three Oscar winners picked before the Oscars were even announced (not to mention 'Anora' that was shown at the Club in January) plus an amazing array of International films from all over the world, including Australia, Japan, China, Iran, Palestine, Mexico and even Bhutan, not to mention the UK, Europe and USA.

The audiences came from far and wide too – Scotland, London even Dorset as well as many from Cumbria and Lancashire – and included students from Edinburgh University, Carlisle College and Birkbeck College, whilst there were three film directors and several cast members visiting over the weekend, helping to celebrate alongside several of the stalwart members of the club who had run the festival over the past 25 years.

It is impossible to pick 'the best' film – it will be different for everyone anyway – but the Audience vote gave it to 'The Marching Band' from France, scoring an incredible 93% (This is being shown at Rheged again this Sunday at 2.00pm if anyone wants to see it – I will be there!) closely followed by 'This is Going to be Big' from Australia and 'The Monk and the Gun' from Bhutan. I managed to miss all those; my favourite was the Oscar winning 'Emilia Perez' which was stunning even the second time I saw it and was one of another eight films to score over 80%.

We have to thank Ian Payne, the Festival Director, who has run it so well since 2017, but has now handed on the baton to Julia Vickers who has kindly volunteered to run it next year – "Thank you so much Ian and very good luck, Julia - may it be even better than this year".

Vaughan Ames