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Spring Cinema at Watershed
Posted on Mon 10 Feb
Our Cinema programme team Mark Cosgrove and Steph Read share some of the highlights we’ll be welcoming to Watershed’s cinema screens throughout Spring.
As the Awards corridor (and drama!) comes to a close, we bring you a selection of hand-picked discoveries and rediscoveries guaranteed to broaden your horizons. There’s plenty of opportunities for you to connect with some of the talent behind those smaller films and join in the conversation. Not forgetting the return of acclaimed Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite) to our screens with his eagerly awaited Mickey 17. We can’t wait!
March
Our focus on groundbreaking filmmaker Chantal Akerman whose feature Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles topped the recent Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll continues throughout Feb - March. Highlights include La Captive – an audacious adaptation of French literary giant Marcel Proust; her rarely screened semi-autobiographical Portrait of a Young Girl From the Late Sixties in Brussels; and her playful and energetic musical critique of consumerism, Golden Eighties.
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On the new features front, from the production company of radical British legend Ken Loach comes Laura Carreira’s debut film On Falling, a powerful meditation on social isolation and alienation. Working round the clock at an Amazon-style centre in Edinburgh, Portuguese warehouse picker Aurora is beholden to the algorithm. We’re very pleased to be joined by the director for a Q&A following a special Glasgow Film Festival on Tour preview of her film here on Wed 5 March.
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Acclaimed Korean director Bong Joon-Ho follows up his hugely successful Best Picture winner Parasite with the eagerly awaited Mickey 17, which opens Fri 7 March and stars Robert Pattinson as an ‘expendable’ employee who quite literally dies for a living. The film sees the director shift gears back into sci-fi thriller territory, in the vein of his earlier post-apocalyptic feature Snowpiercer, but with a much stronger comedic streak.
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Both films are included in our Thought in Action strand, which returns for its seventh year. This collaboration between Watershed and UWE’s Philosophy and Politics departments opens conversations, drawing on the topics of the films. This year’s series themed around labour continues with On Falling (Thu 13 March), Mickey 17 (Thu 20 March) and The Last Showgirl (Thu 3 April).
New film from BAFTA-winning and Oscar®-nominated Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (from Fri 7 March), is an intimate portrait of the South African photographer who chronicled everyday life under apartheid and the struggle for freedom. The film mines a selection of 60,000 negatives, thought lost, which Cole took during his time living in exile in America.
Peck gives Cole’s work and legacy a second life on screen, offering an essential story that sadly resonates with the ongoing the fight for equity and human rights.
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Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis’ Oscar-nominated animation Flow tails a black cat that bands together with other animals on a perilous survival adventure following a cataclysmic flood. It’s a wonderful film for children – playfully and meaningfully depicting the give-and-take of friendship – but no less for adults, with its stunning visual style and characters loaded with individuality. Building on the promise of his feature debut Away, Zilbalodis delivers a truly captivating, dialogue-free escapade, breathtaking in its ambition and scope. Playing here from Fri 21 March.
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Misericordia, one of the highlights from last year’s Cannes and London Film Festivals finally finds its way to this side of the Channel, opening on Fri 28 March. French provocateur Alain Guiraudie, whose Strangers in the Lake screened in 2014 at Watershed, returns with some typically uncategorisable entertainment.
“A bit of a late-night surprise for me at Cannes – it won’t be for everyone, but I really took to this darkly eccentric and offbeat small-town tale. At times it feels like it’s oddly echoing Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) – offering a relatively weighty philosophical treatise on guilt and redemption, smuggled through under the guise of a quiet, rural French melodrama. Layered with many cyclical repetitions, Guiraudie offers up an entertainingly absurd take on the murderous perversities and erotic preoccupations of village country life.”
– Steph Read, Cinema Programmer
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On Mother’s Day (Sun 30 March), we’ll be hosting a preview of the heartwarming London Film Festival Audience Award winner, Four Mothers. Aptly described by film critic Guy Lodge as ‘a modestly framed domestic comedy with surprising reserves of wisdom and sadness’, the film follows an up-and-coming queer Irish writer as he juggles caring for four very different elderly mothers. The film then opens at Watershed on Fri 4 April.
Also, in the spirit of Mother’s Day, we close out our Chantal Akerman season with a screening of her final feature No Home Movie – a forthright, yet emotionally fragile portrait of her relationship with her mother in later life.
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Inside Screen + 16-25 Film Club
For those aged 16-25 and looking to find pathways into careers in the screen industries, we have our annual Inside Screen event on Sat 15 March. With screenings of recent BFI NETWORK-funded short films, a line-up of very special guest speakers, and a chance to network with your peers and industry professionals, Inside Screen is a day for you to get inspired, get connected and take that next step in your career.
We’re also looking for three people aged 18-25 to work together as Film Club hosts at Watershed, in partnership with BFI Film Academy. You’ll gain experience and insights into programming, marketing and content curation around new film releases, hosting and facilitating, as well as catch some special previews of upcoming films. Apply before Fri 21 Feb 12noon.
April
On weekend afternoons throughout April we’ll be remembering the indelible mark on contemporary cinema left by the late, great visionary David Lynch with a season of his works – Behind the Curtain: The Films of David Lynch.
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Continuing a recent trend of documentaries about photographers (following both I Am Martin Parr and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found from earlier this year too) is the melodramatically titled Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other. The doc follows acclaimed photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his partner Maggie, a self-published writer, dissecting the cracks in the dynamic of their relationship as they navigate ageing, caregiving, and the disparity in their artistic success. Both Joel and Maggie will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat 5 April, along wit the documentary's co-directors Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter.
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Another documentary highlight from the season is award-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald’s latest – One to One: John & Yoko – a revealing archival capsule of the couple’s time together in their West Village apartment in New York of the early 70s.
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We will be celebrating the 55th annual Earth Day on Tue 22 April with a special event organised by staff belonging to our Environmental Group – keep an eye on our website for more details closer to the time.
Opening on Fri 25 April is another critically lauded festival film, Julie Keeps Quiet.
An assured and absorbingly tense debut feature exploring the knotty power relationship in the coach / talented teenager dynamic. Newcomer - and talented teen tennis player - Tessa Van den Broeck is ferociously implacable as the youngster caught in an increasingly tense emotional crossfire. Both her and director Leonardo Van Dijl are stars to watch out for.
– Mark Cosgrove, Cinema Curator
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To mark South Africa Freedom Day, we’ll be screening Comrade Tambo’s London Recruits (Sat 26 April) in collaboration with the Bristol Radical History Group. The screening takes place on the evening of their wider Festival, which includes a programme of talks and events at M-Shed. At the height of apartheid, an international group of working-class students and workers living in London answered Oliver Tambo’s secret call for undercover agents. This film tells the story of Tambo’s daring, non-violent strategy to bring hope to his embattled people in South Africa.
After the film, we’ll be joined for a Q&A with the film’s director, Gordon Main, and one of the original ‘London Recruits’, Bevis Miller, who now resides in Bristol.
A film you might have noticed lurking at the very end of our calendar on the What’s On page for the last few months is Wong Kar Wai’s romantic breakthrough hit Chungking Express. It’s the 30th anniversary of the film’s original UK release this year, and we’re celebrating with a special screening playing on the expiry date of all those cans of pineapple Cop 223 obsessively collects in the film (Thu 1 May).
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These are just some of the highlights over the next few months, but there’s plenty more to see and more to be announced too!