24th Keswick Film Festival

This Thursday sees the start of the 2024 Film Festival with the sold out European Première of Between The Lights (there are still some tickets available for the Saturday screening). From there our cinematic world tour takes in Malaysia, Mexico, Tunisia, Georgia, Japan, Iran and the USA. Recent BAFTA winners The Zone Of Interest and American Fiction are showing at the Alhambra on Sunday. The Osprey Short Film Awards are a free event at the Theatre By The Lake on Saturday featuring 9 new Cumbrian short films. The big screen at Rheged is in use once again for Samsara, The Taste Of Things, Tótem, Four Daughters and The New Boy. On Friday evening we'll be joined by co-directors Ali Catterall and Jane Giles for their riotous new doc Scala!!! (or to give the film its full title: Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits). There are 24 feature films over the long weekend including award favourites, critically acclaimed selections and previews of films not yet on release in the UK. 

Tickets and passes are available from the Alhambra, we hope to see you there.

Poor Things - Sunday 25th February 5pm

 

This week you can see Emma Stone's BAFTA winning performance in Poor Things, the latest from the strangely brilliant director Yorgos Lanthimos. The film was nominated for 11 BAFTAS and also won for production design, make up and hair, costume and special visual effects.

Emma Stone stars as Bella, the 'Frankengirl' brought back to life by Doctor Baxter (Willem Defoe). Rather than becoming a monster, however, Bella gets more and more complete as she discovers first how to move and talk, then the pleasures of the flesh (with sleazy, caddish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). But to Wedderburn's disgust, she then turns to reading and before you know it, she is out-thinking and outsmarting the men.

"Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement… And his leading lady is someone who takes it to the next career level, or the level beyond the next level" - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

AGM - Sunday 18th February 4:30pm

We are having our normal very brief AGM before Love Life, please come for 4.30 onwards to enjoy a free drink while we make decisions for the coming year.

We have moved our AGM back in the calendar to allow time for the accounts to be audited, so this meeting will cover 18 months (but will still not take long as all the info you need is on our website, please try to read it before the meeting). The election of officers and Trustees is essential so do please come along or we will not be able to continue.

Love Life - Sunday 18th February 5pm

In a film strangely reminiscent of 'Past Lives', but with a very different feel, 'Love Life' explores Love and Life as past loves come back to haunt the lives of a Japanese couple.

In a wonderful, chaotic family, "The delicate domestic balance shared by Taeko and her second husband, Jiro, is upended when a tragedy strikes the family, in this wrenching Japanese melodrama from Kôji Fukada.

"An enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper" - David Ehrlich, indieWire

The Peasants - Sunday 11th February 5pm

For The Peasants the makes of 'Loving Vincent' have taken a Polish classic novel as a basis and produced a "ravishingly beautiful visual triumph". The story is of Jamila, a striking blonde beauty who is admired by every male in the village, including both the rich Maciej and his eldest son Antek, who Jamila loves. When Maciej arranges a marriage for himself with Jamila, the affair with his son continues, with disastrous results.

“A disconcertingly beautiful picture about the ugliness of humanity.” - Wendy Ide, The Observer