Mark Cosgrove’s Weekly Blog – 20 Feb 2019
Each week Cinema Curator, Mark Cosgrove, reflects on this week’s Watershed’s cinema programme and performance of individual titles over the weekend before looking ahead to what’s coming up.
A break last week whilst at Berlin Film Festival, where films like Wang Quan’an’s Öndög, Mark Jenkins’ homegrown Bait and Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son were the highlights – but more on that later.
Back in holdover/opening weekend figures it was great to see Lee Chang-dong’s Burning continue to do well at the UK box-office. We kept it on for a third week and could have easily done a fourth if we had had the space.
However there is still a lot of competition for space with Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk opening brilliantly and holding well in its second weekend and A Private War doing fantastic opening weekend business at Watershed – much better that I was anticipating.
All making this weekend coming tricky as I try to keep all of these whilst opening Capernaum, Old Boys and Teddy Prendergrass!
Acknowledgement should be given for the Japan Foundation Touring Programme. We have been a partner on this for a few years now and the films – all relatively unknown in the UK – continue to attract strong audiences for single shows.
Mark Cosgrove
Watershed Cinema Curator
Film Hub South West Chair
Mark Jenkin, Associate Lecturer at Falmouth, is making waves with his latest feature film, BAIT.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, Capernaum opens on Friday.
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