PROGRAMME
Planned films for the Year 2024/25​
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Doors open at 7.00pm and all films start at 7.30pm, unless otherwise stated
24 January 2025
Io Capitano
Italy 2023
Drama
Dir: Matteo Garrone
Cert: 15
2 hours 2 minutes
Two teenage boys star in Matteo Garrone’s passionate expose of how greed, trauma and corruption drive the modern-day slave trade in would be migrants. His new film is part adventure story, part slavery drama.
Seydou and Moussa, played by nonprofessional acting newcomers, dream of escape to the fabled land of the EU as refugees, where they expect to go viral and make a fortune as music stars like the people they’re watching on TikTok. For years they have been writing songs and secretly working on building sites while pretending to go to football practice, amassing cash savings which in the succeeding months they will hand over to various gangmasters, fixers and corrupt gun-wielding soldiers.
Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion remain buoyant.
21 February 2025
My Favourite Cake
Iran 2024
Romance/Drama
Dirs: Maryam Moghadam, Behtash Sanaeeha
Cert: 15
1 hr 37 minutes
A charming film of a 70 year old Iranian’s appetite for romance. It is wonderfully sweet and funny and will contribute to the debate about whether repressive regimes are the nursery of artistic greatness. The Iranian government has prevented the film’s two directors from travelling to Berlin to attend their own premiere - six months ago, their production offices were raided and computers and hard drives confiscated. But, fortunately, the film-makers had a copy stored in another country, and the film’s gentle humanity is a compelling rebuke to this fatuous, clumsy repression.
7 March 2025
Joyland
Pakistan 2022
Drama
Dir: Saim Sadiq
Cert: 15
2 hours 6 minutes
Having told his family he is the theatre manager, the youngest son in a traditional Pakistani family takes a job as a backup dancer in a Bollywood-style burlesque and quickly becomes infatuated with the strong-willed trans woman who runs the show.
This is a movie about people who find their inner lives and sense of themselves don’t match up to what is expected of them.
Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.
21 March 2025
The Teacher's Lounge
Germany 2023
Drama
Dir. Ilker Catak
Cert: 12A
1 hr 38 minutes
Carla Nowak, a dedicated sports and math teacher, starts her first job at a high school. She stands out among the new staff because of her idealism. When a series of thefts occur at the school and one of her students is suspected, she decides to get to the bottom of the matter on her own.
It's not easy to make an intense thriller about things that happen every day. But when one appears, it's glorious. Ilker Çatak’s "The Teacher's Lounge" is glorious. If you do see it, you'll come away knowing that you’ve seen a proper movie, with its own theme and distinct aesthetic and strong personality, not just another piece of flavourless ‘content.’
9 May 2025
All We Imagine as Light
India 2024
Drama
Dir: Payal Kapadia
Cert: 15
1 hour 55 minutes
This is an absorbing study of three nurses in modern-day Mumbai and it is a glorious film. The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. The film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. There is a freshness and emotional clarity in the film, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments.