The Swimming Pool - Sunday 15th January 5pm

We stay across La Manche for this Sunday's film, with a classic from 1969 - The Swimming Pool. Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and a young Jane Birkin, (just 3 years after she was in Blow Up, to give you something of a timeline).  From a review of the DVD:

This dark drama .......may have been the film in production near St. Tropez when on October 1, 1968, Delon's shady bodyguard was found murdered. Delon's movements were investigated and he was held for questioning, though he was never charged with the crime. Nevertheless, the scandal was the talk of Europe for many months and never entirely went away, cementing Delon's dangerous image and forever blurring his offscreen life to film roles. 

The Well Diggers Daughter - Sunday 8th January 5pm

We start the club season THIS SUNDAY (8 January) with our usual free drinks - 4.15 at the Alhambra - a chance to shake off the January blues, forget the wind and say hello to each other again. It is also a chance for you to buy this season's pass. £26 will get you in to all twelve films - a bargain in anyone's book! These will be on sale at a table in the stalls (warmer than by the front door!) AND, if you haven't already joined the club, you can  still pay for this year's membership; at £7, you STILL have chance to save money - not only do you get £1 off ALL club films, you save £1 on ALL festival films too! How can you resist!

Sunday's film at 5.00pm  is 'The Well Digger's Daughter' - Daniel Auteuil stars, as well as directing his first movie here. A 1940s tale of love, class and honour, set in pre-WW2 Provence, we follow the beautiful Daughter of the title as she falls in love with the well-off shopkeeper's son...just in time to get pregnant as he flies off to war. The Well Digger then has to decide how to deal with his favourite daughter without losing honour in his local community. The story comes from a book by Marcel Pagnol, who also wrote 'Jean de Florette' and 'Manon des Sources', two films which brought Daniel Auteuil to fame in the 1980s...

Merry Christmas from Keswick Film Club

A Small Act brings us to the end of our Autumn season of films. We're now taking a short break over Christmas but we'll be back on January 8th with The Well Diggers Daughter. There are another 10 films in the Spring Programme as well as an evening of short film and around 30 films on offer at the 13th Keswick Film Festival in February.

Merry Christmas.

A Small Act - Sunday 18th December 2011

And so to our final film of 2011. It only seems like a week or two ago that Adele Blanc Sec kicked off the autumn programme.  A Small Act, on Sunday shouldn't contain any battle scenes, nor any embarrassing nuptuals. From the Guardian:

Directed by an American graduate in African history from UCLA and the University of Nairobi, this touching documentary takes its title from the small amount of money given each month to pay for the education of a poor boy in rural Kenya. Hilde Back arrived in Sweden as a refugee in 1940; her parents died in the Holocaust. The beneficiary of her generosity, Chris Mburu, subsequently went on to Harvard Law School, as did his cousin Jane, and both are now leading figures with the United Nations...

The Princess of Montpensier - Sunday 11th December 5pm

In the run up to Christmas, this week's film, The Princess of Montpensier, should be lighter than last week's. Bertrand Tavernier has been directing films since the 1960s (remember 'Sunday in the Country' or 'Round Midnight'?). He is one of the most prolific and generous of directors, and there is no word that summarizes a "Tavernier film" except, usually, masterful.

The story here is of a noblewoman forced to marry a man she has never met. It is set against the religious wars of the 16th Century in France, but it tells mainly of the  the contradictions between her value as a possession and as an object of desire, between her desires (for both knowledge and passion) and her complete lack of rights to decide for herself.