Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Programme

Watershed

Explore alternative ways of connecting older films with a new wave of cinema goers & get inspired to broaden repertory cinema beyond the mainstream.

Cinema 1

The 7th edition of Cinema Rediscovered opens with a discussion inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which seized the top spot in Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time poll this year.

Cinema 1 and Cinema 2

Sofia Coppola’s debut feature is a melancholic, dreamy vision that marked her out as a distinctive new voice in cinema.

Cinema 1

A new 4K restoration of the original 1953 cinema release print of Kubrick’s debut feature film which he subsequently cut following negative audience response.

Cinema 1

Join Tara Judah for a very special double-bill on film, starting with BAFTA-winning director Mark Jenkin's A Dog Called Discord commissioned by the BFI to mark their recent Film on Film Festival.

Waterside 2, Watershed

Whether you’re a film lover or are aspiring to work in film writing/criticism, this session will give you insights into Sight & Sound, home to a once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll.

Cinema 1

A look at the increasingly ubiquitous role of lists in shaping and navigating the past present and future of film culture.

Cinema 3

Following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Cleveland’s black community is on a knife-edge, wondering who, if anyone, can be trusted.

Cinema 2

Muratova’s debut solo feature is an impressionistic dissection of a love triangle in freefall, which was banned by Soviet censors for twenty years until the advent of perestroika.

Cinema 1

Chantal Akerman’s slow-burning masterpiece was voted as the Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

Waterside 2, Watershed

Join season curator Andy Willis for a talk that invites you to re-think the contribution of Hollywood’s blacklistees to American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Cinema 2

A radical, elliptical tale of a mother-and-son drifitng apart, Muratova’s underseen classic is a refreshingly challenging cinematic work.

Cinema 2 and Cinema 3

Juliet Bashore’s queer docufiction stars Tigr Mennett and real-life porn star girlfriend Sharon Mitchell celebrates the heady days of the San Francisco underground in the 1980s.

Cinema 1

Spinning a web of intrigue around her male victims, this erotic thriller is centred around one of the all-time great femme fatales!

Cinema 3

In this classic late 1960s liberal western from Abraham Polonsky, Robert Redford leads a posse in pursuit of a native American on the run in the early part of the 20th century.

Cinema 1

Newly restored, Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive is a stylistically daring and vibrant pulp trip through 1990s Hong Kong.

Cinema 1

A journey behind the curtain of film preservation, and the painstaking work that ensures film stays alive for modern audiences.

Cinema 3

Based on interviews with Mazzetti shortly before her death in 2020, this documentary reclaims her position as a key artist of post-war Europe.

Waterside 2, Watershed

Join a discussion with filmmakers and artists who use and work with the medium of 16mm fiilm.

Cinema 1

This rediscovered gem of American DIY filmmaking is an elegiac tribute to Black female originality.

Cinema 3

A pair of Deaf dock workers struggle to make ends meet in London’s East End in Lorenza Mazzetti’s lyrical centrepiece of Free Cinema.

Cinema 2

A searing, compassionate three-and-a-half-hour exploration of relationships in the May ’68 sexual revolution's aftermath.

Café & Bar, Watershed

Join us at the 13:35 screening of Together on Fri 28 July which will feature BSL interpreters to describe any sounds or dialogue that form part of the film. After the screening please joins us, from 14:30, for a post-screening discussion in the Café & Bar. The discussion will be hosted by Deaf artist, performer and filmmaker David Ellington and will feature BSL interpretation throughout.

Cinema 3

Black and white collides with Technicolor fantasy in Muriel Box’s romantic comedy, poking fun at the wish fulfilment behind cinematic romances.

Cinema 1

Hustler and singer Jason Holliday regales us over a long night of the soul in this iconic LGBTQ+ documentary.

Cinema 1

Female voyeurism and desire collide together in the centre of a seedy early ‘80s New York.

Cinema 3

Highly praised but little seen, this stark murder mystery rips the police procedural film apart.

Bristol Aquarium (about 3 min walk from Watershed)

On the director’s centenary year, rediscover this wild and trippy blast of Japanese genre cinema!

Cinema 1

Barbara Loden’s only feature film is a masterpiece of hardscrabble, independent Americana.

Café & Bar, Watershed

A screening of shorts projected on 16mm in the Café & Bar, closing with a rare screening of Michael Snow’s experimental film Wavelength (courtesy of LUX Moving Image).

Across Bristol

Join local enthusiast and historian Mark Fuller for the first of two different, gentle, walks that between them take in the landmarks and personalities of cinema in central Bristol from the 1880s to the present day.

Cinema 1

Sex, hair salons and state affairs all collide in this classic farce starring Warren Beatty and the formerly blacklisted Lee Grant as Felicia Karpf.

Cinema 2

A naturalist fantasy in kaleidoscopic colours, as a family holidays in the Stockholm archipelago.

Waterside 2, Watershed

Join BFI National Film Archive Curatorial Archivist Rosie Taylor to see films screened on a 9.5mm projector and learn more about its prolific and fascinating history.

Cinema 3

A Teherani taxi driver finds an abandoned baby in the back seat of his cab, journeying through the city in a vain attempt to find the infant’s mother.

Cinema 2

In an Oscar®-nominated performance, Diahann Carroll plays a black working class mother struggling to make ends meet, offering an antidote to the testosterone driven star-turns of the blaxploitation cycle.

Cinema 1

Forgotten at the time, this extravagant production of Salomé is now one of the great feminist films.

20th Century Flicks (about 9 min walk from Watershed)

The great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer gives a surreal spin on Lewis Carroll's classic story with this truly absurd tale which mixes animation and live action to brilliant effect.

Cinema 1

The film that helped director Robert Altman break through into the mainstream, M*A*S*H captures the meeting of the free-wheeling sentiments of the 1960s counter-culture with the cynicism that would emerge within American society in the 1970s.

20th Century Flicks (about 9 min walk from Watershed)

Drawing on Creole folklore, and the stories that arose out of her childhood, Kasi Lemmons’s debut is a bewitching Southern Gothic tale.

Cinema 1

A hazy, neon-splattered descent through modern Taipei at night-time, thrumming with techno, alcohol and ennui.

Across Bristol

Party like it’s 1969! An expanded screening of Sundance award-winner Summer of Soul, followed by an underground funk & soul party in The Galleries Car Park Basement in Broadmead.

Cinema 3

The devoutly anarchic comic satire on religion, greed and consumerism in 1980s America.

Cinema 3

A cult classic of Brazilian Queer cinema, this outrageously funky and stylish crime film infuriated the Brazilian military dictatorship at the time.

Cinema 1

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman hustle their way through 1960s New York in this bittersweet classic of New Hollywood which remains the only X-rated film to be awarded the Oscar® for Best Picture.

Across Bristol

Join local enthusiast and historian Mark Fuller for the second of two gentle, walks that between them take in the landmarks and personalities of cinema in central Bristol from the 1880s to the present day.

Cinema 1

Lee Thompson’s gripping capital punishment drama Yield to the Night from 1956 is a Brit noir classic and a unique career achievement for Diana Dors as Mary Hilton, a woman awaiting execution for murder.

Across Bristol

Lovers of analogue, immerse yourself in the sensory splendour of 16mm, in its centenary year! Enjoy free workshops in splicing, dicing and projecting, alongside live performances from Surgeons Girl.

Cinema 3

Join Professor Ian Christie for this special screening of A Trip to Tetlapayac in search of Eisenstein in Mexico, plus the UK Premiere of Mark Rappaport's The Marriage of Greta Garbo and Sergei Eisenstein.

Cinema 1

Remembered for Al Pacino’s dynamic central performance as an NYPD cop resisting the corruption all around him, Serpico is a classic film of the paranoid 1970s, one that offers a detailed depiction of a system gone bad.

Cinema 3

A kimono designer in 1950s Kyoto is caught between two worlds in this riveting melodrama.

Cinema 2

An instant classic from its premiere onwards, Charlotte Wells’ debut feature marks her as a thrilling new voice in cinema.

Cinema 1

Lynne Ramsay’s second feature is a mesmerising journey into a 21st century existential crisis shown here on a brand new 35mm BFI print.

Cinema 3

Calypso music is celebrated in all its beauty in this restored documentary featuring legends such as Calypso Rose and Lord Kitchener.

Curzon Clevedon (about 45 min bus journey from Watershed)

Take a trip out to one of the oldest running cinema venues in the country and experience Sidney Lumet’s take on the true story of New York policeman Frank Serpico in a brand new 4K restoration for its 50th anniversary.

Cinema 1

A radical view of the cultural and social upheavals of the late 1960s America from an African perspective.

Café & Bar, Watershed

Wind down and rediscover the movie trivia hidden in the recesses of your brain.