Monday, March 20, 2017

The White King - Sunday 26th March 5pm

For those of you who enjoyed meeting Greta Scacchi at the Festival, she appears again in The White King this weekend, alongside a clutch of other stars including Jonathan Pryce and Agyness Deyn. The real star, though is 15 year old Lorenzo Allchurch, fresh from the London stage in his first movie. He plays Djata, a young boy who goes looking for his 'disappeared' father in an Orwellian future state just called The Homeland, where any form of dissent is not allowed...

Monday, March 13, 2017

The Handmaiden - Sunday 19th March 5pm

In this season of varied genres, styles and countries, it is the turn of South Korea to bring you a twisting, turning melodramatic and, yes, erotic thriller: The Handmaiden is "a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics" – Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail.

Filmed in three acts, each bringing the view from a different character, we see Sookee (the Handmaiden) helping Count Fujiwara to entice Hideko to marry him...but maybe none of this is really what is really going on. Meanwhile Sookee and Hideko are falling in love. Set in Japanese occupied Korea in the 1930s, where Koreans are pretending to be Japanese... "Perhaps not since 'Pulp Fiction' have I seen such a cleverly convoluted story woven together from different perspectives. Act two and three pile on more layers of detail, adding more richness to the story. What seems like a simple tale of greed and betrayal becomes something more in act two and three and there is an ample supply of satisfying comeuppance as well" – Robert Roten, Laramie Movie Scope. Oh...and did I mention the eroticism..?

Monday, March 06, 2017

The Black Hen - Sunday 12th March 5pm

We come to another film in our 'accidental theme' of child stars this week – The Black Hen – which features two young boys searching for their lost chicken in Nepal. The real drama is the backdrop of the growing civil war in their region; the two lads set out to find the bird, oblivious to the danger this will bring to them. "A gentle, humane and beautifully photographed movie from Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bham, whose short film ‘The Flute’ and then this debut feature were hits at the Venice film festival", says Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, but the civil war brings moments of violence to this  'bucolic calm'.