Another season has ended; Christmas is here again. We hope you have enjoyed the films this season; we visited twelve different countries and included five 'F-rated' films (films with 'significant female involvement'). There was an average of over 111 people at the shows, with an average score of almost 80% so It looks like you did enjoy it, or at least most of them. The lowest attendance was 61 (at Rheged for the classic 'The Graduate' - I guess we will stick to new films in future...), the highest was 170 for 'A Man Called Ove', whilst the score ranged from 44% for 'The Ghoul' to 91% for 'Land of Mine'. I think my favourite was probably 'Franz' - what was your favourite? Let us know over on Facebook or Twitter.
This Sunday at 5.00 we finish our season with our only Japanese film - After the Storm - where we meet Shinoda: down on his luck, trying to make ends meet as a private detective, not accepting the end of his marriage. His attempts to make up with his family are given a boost by the storm, which keeps all of them together over night at his mother's house. Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, "After the Storm is a family drama, a 21st-century variation on the classic Japanese style of which this film-maker is now the international standard-bearer... There is such intelligence and delicacy in Koreeda's film-making, such wit and understated humanity."– Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.
If you remember I Wish, or Still Walking, you will know what he means; this should be a gentle film, where food and family meals take on high importance....just right to put you in the mood for the Club Christmas meal which follows straight afterwards, and the Christmas break which we hope you enjoy until we are back on 7 January.
This Sunday at 5.00 we have a French treat - The Midwife - starring Catherine Frot (a French star since the 1970s who specialises in comedy roles) and Catherine Deneuve, who has been around French cinema even longer, playing almost any roles, but starting with ‘aloof, mysterious beauties’ - Wikipedia. The Midwife brings the two together in almost the opposite roles; Frot as a well-organised, contented midwife and Deneuve as the ex-mistress of her father, now a fun-loving lush.
All reviewers agree that the two actors are great, making the meeting between the two characters very memorable: "What brings the two women together after 30 years? ...With Martin Provost's film deepening pleasingly as it goes on, and both women (Frot and Deneuve) giving excellent performances, you'll enjoy trying to work it all out" – Matthew Bond, Mail on Sunday. (I don't think I have quoted him before, but I thought he said it all and that you might like to try to work out what 'deepening pleasingly' means at the same time!).
We have a mental twister for you this Sunday at 5.00 when we are back in the UK for - The Ghoul. Before you start thinking of zombies and ghosts, this ghoul is just someone who can't resist looking at crime scenes. Our hero, Chris is a policeman looking for a particular ghoul to help him solve a crime... OR is he a depressive who goes to a therapist for help?
"In other words, writer-director Gareth Tunley offers us not one but two diegetic routes through his feature debut, one paved in genre, the other in a more banal realism. While from early on it is clear – and meant to be clear – which is the master narrative and which the slave, the decision to present and interweave both through Chris's addled perspective ensures that fantasy continues to contaminate the most grounded of sequences, and vice versa" – Anton Bitel, Sight & Sound.
Four weeks ago we saw In Syria, experiencing the war from inside. In The Other Side Of Hope we have the story of Khaled, a Syrian refugee trying to make sense of Finland. It's a humorous look at two cultures ("Don’t smile in the street" another refugee advises, and the glum faces seem to bear that out.) It's also the story of numerous outsiders and misfits, not least Waldemar Wikström who gives him a job in a rather odd restaurant. Aki Kaurismäki gained the Golden Bear for best director at the Berlin Film Festival. It perhaps tells us something about all our attitudes to refugees.