Introduction and Q and A by Holly Tarquini, Founder of the F-Rating, producer of Bath Film Festival and life-long feminist.
Holly Tarquini, producer at the Bath Film Festival, is known for establishing a new rating system, the F-Rating, which is applied to films which have a strong female director, actor or writer. Gravity is the perfect film to illustrate the point, failing the Bechdel Test it is nevertheless a heart-pounding thriller, a philosophical meditation on the human condition and a kick-ass feminist cinema manifesto.
This film will be introduced by Kayla Parker, Artist film-maker and Lecturer in Media Arts at Plymouth University.
This is a provocative and shocking drama about sibling rivalry, family discord and relationships. Elena is 15, beautiful and flirtatious. Her less confident sister, Anais, is 12, and constantly eats. On holiday, Elena meets a young Italian student who is determined to seduce her. Anais is forced to watch in silence...
This film will be introduced by Roberta Mock, Professor of Performance Studies and Director of the Creative Arts & Humanities Research Institute at Plymouth University.
Oscar-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who’s telling it. In questioning her own paternity she unravels the essence of family: complicated, messy and fiercely loving. Exploring the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families. Polley’s...
In this existential drama of the Japanese New Wave an unnamed school teacher and amateur insect collector misses his bus back to Tokyo. Local villagers invite him to stay with a young widow who lives at the bottom of a sand dune. The next morning, the villagers refuse to drop the ladder down the sand dune and inform him that he must stay. Evoking the myth of Sisyphus, the characters’ eternal battle with the sand keeps them immobile,...
Filmed on location in Wales and adapted from the novel by Bruce Chatwin, this is the story of two brothers, identical twins, who farm the same land their family have farmed for generations. The film covers 80 years in the siblings’ lives which forms a backdrop to the drama of the land, and the changes in agricultural life throughout the 20th century. The film celebrates the people and land of the Black Mountains and of how the world of rural existence and struggle is inextricably linked to the lives of the people who inhabit it....
Wim Wenders' documentary portrait of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.
The Salt of the Earth is Wim Wenders' documentary portrait of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, perhaps most famous for his mid-1980s shots of Brazil's biblically vast gold mines and their workers. Notably Salgado photographed the terrible Rwandan genocide of the '90s – after which horror he necessarily switched focus from military subjects to environmental activism instead. Wenders' masterful film fully exploits the supreme power of Salgado's stunning, almost...
Cast: Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano
An idyllic village in Italy's mountainous region of Calabria is the setting for this exquisitely filmed take on the cycles of life. Structured in four parts, it opens with a shepherd tending his herd of goats, then shifts focus to one goat in particular, the tree under which he seeks shelter, and the industrialised fate of that plant.
Date/time: Monday 25 January | 19:00
Venue: Jill Craigie Cinema, Roland Levinsky Building...
Cast: Jenny Agutter, Bryan Marshall, Simon Ward, Clare Sutcliffe.
14 year old Wynne (Jenny Agutter, two years before Walkabout) is a schoolgirl who lives with a foster family and is inseparable from her friend Corinne (Sutcliffe). Wynne has crush on her older foster brother George who she suspects may be the man killing local young girls. Agutter is superb as Wynne, poised and intelligent at times and woefully ill-equipped at others, in this often overlooked classic...
Running time: 85 minutes Certificate: UK Language: English
Director: Anthony Asquith, Geoffrey Barkas Cast: Fay Compton, Carl Harbord, Dennis Hoey. Introduction by Dr Simon Topping, Plymouth University
Tell England is set before the outbreak of WW1 and shows the friendship between two men before they enlist. Both directors had close memories of Gallipoli, as did Fay Compton's brother, Compton Mackenzie. Asquith's father H. H. Asquith had been Prime Minister at the time of the Gallipoli Landings, a fact which drew press attention to the film, while Geoffrey Barkas...
Director: Walter Summers New Score: Simon Dobson Introduction by Simon Dobson
To commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of WW1, the BFI National Archive has restored one of the finest films of the British silent era – a thrilling reconstruction of two decisive naval battles from the early stages of the conflict. Filmed on real battleships supplied by the Admiralty, this monumental production was shot mostly at sea near Malta, with the Scilly Isles a convincing stand-in for the Falklands. You will even see shots of...
