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

25th Keswick Film Festival

 

This week it's the 25th Keswick Film Festival and one of the biggest programmes we've ever had. It starts on Thursday with Harvey Greenfield Is Running Late which is now sold out but there's an additional screening at 9:15 on Saturday morning. At the time of writing the closing film Cottontail looks like it might sell out as well so we're also showing it in Screen 2. In between there's plenty to see; from award hopefuls like The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez, previews of new films such as Flow, Sister Midnight and Misericordia and a 50th Anniversary screening of Tommy which Mark Kermode just described as "one of the most important and groundbreaking pop movies of all time" in his final Observer column. There are free short film at the Ospreys and showcase from Oska Bright Film Festival, £5 Family Films (which are all really great and not just for kids) and a selection of modern classics and favourites in the new Screen2/Take2 strand. The real question is how to you choose what not to see?

The Problem With People - Sunday 2nd March 5pm

The Problem With People is a very Irish comedy and another choice from our members. Co-written by the American actor Paul Reiser who stars alongside Colm Meaney as cousins trying to heal a family rift.

"A breezy and affable tale of bittersweet reconciliation, this quirky and well-acted comedy delivers its misanthropy with a hint of irascible charm" - Todd Jorgenson, Cinemalogue

In The Mood For Love - Sunday 23rd February 5pm

 

In this beautiful film chosen by the Alhambra's Carol Rennie to fit in the Mint Chinese Film Festival weekend, we return to one of the first films ever shown by the club in 2001. Winner of more than 40 awards when it was released, including best actor and cinematography at Cannes, and rave reviews such as "probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever" – Elvis Mitchell, New York Times - whether you saw it then or not, this is a great chance to see this classic film.

The Crime Is Mine - Sunday 16th February 5pm

Our members's picked François Ozon's The Crime Is Mine which takes a stage play from the 1930s and produces a frothy, beautiful, #MeToo film for the 2020s full of twists and turns, comedy and drama; what more could we ask for?

"Writer-director Francois Ozon creates a wonderfully engaging vibe that mixes in little jolts of realism amid the generally breezy, gleefully camp thrills." - Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

Black Dog - Sunday 9th February 5pm

What looks like a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max setting, or maybe a Clint Eastwood loner western, is in fact set on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in China, the loner here is Lang – just released from long-term jail and returning to his hometown. But the town is being destroyed to make ready for the 2008 Beijing Olympics; the population is being relocated and the only job he can find is as a dogcatcher helping to round up the seemingly endless pack of feral dogs… One of these, the Black Dog of the title, becomes Lang's buddy of course.

"Black Dog registers as an existential fable about isolation, redemption, the possibility of making connections against the odds." - Jonathan Romney, Financial Times

The Universal Theory - Sunday 2nd February 5pm

 

The Universal Theory is set in 1962 where we join Johannes, a student, off to a conference in Switzerland with his amazingly grumpy tutor Dr Julius Strahten. They are joined by Professor Henry Blomberg, who helped the Nazis in the war. 

Before you think this is a German scientific documentary, Jessica Kiang's review in Variety is entitled "A sumptuous homage to Hitchcock packaged as a Metaphysical Noir"; all is not what it seems!

"It is entirely its own exotically original thing. Catch it while it is on the big screen, where its widescreen brilliance truly flourishes." - Jonathan Romney, Financial Times (£)

My Favourite Cake - Sunday 26th January 5pm

In My Favourite Cake we meet Marin a 70 years old who has lived alone for decades since her husband died and her children left home. Even her weekly meeting with her previously wild friends have slipped to monthly…and then yearly. Feeling isolated and lonely, she decides to take her future into her own hands and "sets out to revamp her love life. Before long, her eye is caught by taxi driver Faramaz. Throwing caution to the winds, she engineers a night to remember, filled with music, dance and brain-bruising quantities of wine. But plans have a way of going awry in this lovely, intimate, tragicomic tale of late-blooming love in the shadow of Iran's repressive regime" – Fatima Sheriff, Little White Lies.

Blitz - Sunday 19th January 5pm

Steve McQueen puts his genius to work in Blitz, a drama about the bombing of London in the war, whilst Saoirse Ronan acts her heart out as a mother whose son goes missing.

"A thrilling, moving, morally provoking odyssey through Britain at war, with a flock of vividly sketched supporting characters that buffet George from one adventure to the next." - Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Annual General Meeting - This Sunday at 4:30pm

The AGM of the Keswick Film Club will be held at the Alhambra on Sunday 12th January. We’ll start at 4.30 and be finished for the film which will start as usual at 5.00. 

All the documents are posted on the website - see AGM 2025.

Do come along and hear about what we’ve been doing, and it’s your chance to let the committee know what you think.

All the present officers are standing for re-election but we are always keen for new people to stand, so please get in touch if you are interested.

All We Imagine As Light - Sunday 12th January 5pm

The number one film in Sight & Sounds Films of 2024, All We Imagine As Light takes us to Mumbai, a bustling huge metropolis, never still, teeming with people and stories, where nothing seems permanent. The women all work at a hospital:Prabha is a senior nurse, Anu a trainee and Parvaty, a cook. Their stories are separate but interlocking.

"It's a marvel of a movie, with something of the humanist poetry of Satyajit Ray or Edward Yang. And it’s all the more remarkable given that this is Kapadia’s first fiction feature. What a talent." - Wendy Ide, Observer

 

Anora - Sunday 5th January 5pm

 

We hope you have saved some energy after the Christmas break as we start back on Sunday with Anora, the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes and the film voted Number two in the BFI best 50 films of 2024 - "a wild ride" and "absolutely breathless", "one of the films of the year" as Mark Kermode describes it on Kermode and Mayo's Take. If you don’t believe him, how about Deborah Ross in the Spectator – "I know you won’t believe it’s as good as everyone is saying it is until you hear it from me so here you are: yes, it’s as good as everyone is saying it is."