On a fictional remote Scottish island, gifted young musician Omar and his fellow Syrian asylum seekers endure a puzzling cultural-awareness lesson from an oddball pair of locals. Separated from home and family and burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland, Omar waits in limbo for others to decide his future.
Based on the eponymous novel by Yasmina Khadra and directed as an animated drama by Zabou Breitman and Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec , The Swallows of Kabul portrays life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital. Violence is neither fetishised nor sanitised. The directors portray a regime that relentlessly and sadistically castigates females and suggests that women are less worthy than men and is even more heartbreakingly pertinent under current circumstances.
This sumptuous costume epic evokes the unique rapport between a French missionary (played by Melvil Poupaud) and the Manchurian empress (Chinese super-star Fan Bingbing) whose portrait he is ordered to paint. The film recounts the feverish moment when the Empress meets the Jesuit painter … a moment when the electric relationship between the painter and his model is caught up in the constraints of the court and its rigid rules of etiquette.
Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian who falls in love with Ann (Marion Cotillard), a world-renowned opera singer, and the pair live glamorous lives in contemporary Los Angeles. However, when they welcome their daughter Annette into the world, her mysterious gifts change their lives forever.
In 1990s Scotland, a group of Catholic school girls get an opportunity to go into Edinburgh for a choir competition, but they’re more interested in drinking, partying and hooking up than winning. An affectionate, hilarious and honest exploration of sexuality, pregnancy, class difference and the tumultuous path of true friendship.
Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian who falls in love with Ann (Marion Cotillard), a world-renowned opera singer, and the pair live glamorous lives in contemporary Los Angeles. However, when they welcome their daughter Annette into the world, her mysterious gifts change their lives forever.
On a fictional remote Scottish island, gifted young musician Omar and his fellow Syrian asylum seekers endure a puzzling cultural-awareness lesson from an oddball pair of locals. Separated from home and family and burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland, Omar waits in limbo for others to decide his future.
Based on the eponymous novel by Yasmina Khadra and directed as an animated drama by Zabou Breitman and Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec , The Swallows of Kabul portrays life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital. Violence is neither fetishised nor sanitised. The directors portray a regime that relentlessly and sadistically castigates females and suggests that women are less worthy than men and is even more heartbreakingly pertinent under current circumstances.
This sumptuous costume epic evokes the unique rapport between a French missionary (played by Melvil Poupaud) and the Manchurian empress (Chinese super-star Fan Bingbing) whose portrait he is ordered to paint. The film recounts the feverish moment when the Empress meets the Jesuit painter … a moment when the electric relationship between the painter and his model is caught up in the constraints of the court and its rigid rules of etiquette.
A selection of short films inspired by poetry, including: What’s Wrong With Raymond. Ashes To Fire, 50 Ways To Wank, and Image Of Here and Now.
Selection of Poetry Shorts, including: The Man with Beautiful Eyes. Blood Grandad, and When Among Trees.
The untapped poetry in the lives of ordinary people, leading seemingly ordinary lives, is expressed as high art in this gentle story of an aging woman who discovers the poetry within herself. Heartbreaking and inspiring but without an ounce of sentimentality, Yun Junghee’s memorable performance as Mija, whose life becomes ever more complicated by circumstances out-with her control, is as understated as it is powerful.
In 1990s Scotland, a group of Catholic school girls get an opportunity to go into Edinburgh for a choir competition, but they’re more interested in drinking, partying and hooking up than winning. An affectionate, hilarious and honest exploration of sexuality, pregnancy, class difference and the tumultuous path of true friendship.
Director Pablo Larrain discards the standard biopic formulas and depicts a fabulously mythologised version of the great Chilean poet and activist Pablo Neruda. Told from the perspective of Neruda’s police antagonist, played sympathetically by Gael Garcia Bernal, the movie captures the spirit of the poet, his extraordinary influence on Chilean politics of the time, and fuses film noir with poetic fantasy.
Selection of Poetry Shorts, including: The Man with Beautiful Eyes. Blood Grandad, and When Among Trees.
To what lengths would you go to achieve fame? A pair of Scottish chancers relocate to the epicentre of the hip hop counter-culture and pass themselves off as a Californian rap group. Their cheeky antics are hilarious yet the film shines a caustic light on the illusory nature of celebrity and the gullibility of the suited execs in the hierarchies of the music industry.
We’re told at the start of this movie that most Burmese can write poetry or can recite a poem by heart. Poetry in Burma is an art for the common people. But what if poetry comes into collision with a repressive military regime? Maung Aung Pwint is Burma/Myanmar’s most famous living dissident poet who has been jailed many times by the regime.
A selection of short films inspired by poetry, including: What’s Wrong With Raymond. Ashes To Fire, 50 Ways To Wank, and Image Of Here and Now.
Jodorowsky’s surreal semi-autobiographical movie is a shape-shifting fantasy, an inventive and often hilarious mystical journey through madness, savage social commentary, as profound as anything the director, now in his 80s, has ever created.
Writer & director Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead celebrates its 40th anniversary this year! Five Michigan State University students vacation at an isolated cabin in rural Tennessee, quickly descending into a horrifying night of gore and scares as they unwittingly awake a demonic entity.
After viewing a strangely familiar ‘video nasty’ film, Enid sets out to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, embarking on a quest that dissolves the line between fiction and reality. A psychological horror steeped in ‘80s aesthetics, Censor is an atmospheric and suspenseful love letter to horror classics.
Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. She tries as best she can to keep it together – but then nightmares come. Disturbing visions of a presence in the house calling to her, beckoning her with a ghostly allure.
Everyone in Justine’s family is a vet. And a vegetarian. At 16, she’s a brilliant and promising student. When she starts at veterinary school, she enters a decadent, merciless and dangerously seductive world. During the first week of hazing rituals, desperate to fit in whatever the cost, she strays from her family’s principles when she eats raw meat for the first time.
An earthquake hits Paris and almost immediately unleashes a thick toxic gas that kills everyone who breathes it in. An estranged couple manage to get above the gas (it tops off at about three stories high), but in doing so leave behind their daughter who has an illness that keeps her locked in a filtered containment unit.
Take a documentary musical journey in search of the soul of Afro-Cuban music. From the communist friendships of the Cold War to today, from Havana to Bamako, we follow in the footsteps of ten young Malian musicians in musical training in Cuba, who became a founding group of world music: the legendary Maravillas of Mali. Fifty years later, this forgotten group is resurrected thanks to Maestro Boncana Maïga, its historical conductor.
