The Garden Cinema Film Talk

Director Jack Hazan and editor David Mingay (Rude Boy) had access to David Hockney and his circle from 1970 to 1973, a critical period for the internationally-acclaimed artist following the break-up of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger. As much an intimate study of love gone wrong as a portrait of an artist at work. A Bigger Splash chronicles the emotional ripples that separation casts on th...

This screening of this multi-award winning Merchant Ivory classic is presented by the Fashion Film Club and will be followed by  Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop  curator Keith Lodwick.   This adaptation brings the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit...

"Power Station began in the depths of lockdown - and in the aftermath of our previous film Bank Job , where we purchased and blew up £1.2 million of local debt - with the question ‘'what could we do from where we live, with the people around us, to build power - of energy and imagination?’ Working to turn a street and local schools solar, Power Station is a scalable in-your-face prototype of commu...

14-year-old Zeina and her family are the last to have stayed in their besieged hometown of Damascus in Syria. A missile rips a giant hole in their home, exposing them to the outside world. When a rope is mysteriously lowered into the hole, Zeina gets her first taste of freedom, and an unimaginable world of possibility opens up for her. As the violence outside escalates, the family is pressured to...

Crosspollinating with our Planting Seeds strand, as we are joined by Danusia Samal from Green Rider, a movement of artists and productions shifting the TV & film industry towards a fairer and healthier way of working, and by Josh Cockcroft from Climate Spring, a global organisation dedicated to shifting our cultural response to the climate crisis by championing storytelling that transforms how...

In defiance of the Paris Peace Conference Italian poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio led a rogue, short-lived, and ultranationalist occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1919. Over a century later, filmmaker Igor Bezinović revisits this strange historical episode, blending archive, reenactment and interviews with residents in the present, interrogating how a city remembers and fo...

Ken Loach's longtime collaborator Rebecca O'Brien joins Gareth Evans for a discussion following Sweet Sixteen, showing as part of Ken Loach: A Retrospective at the Garden Cinema.   This Q&A was also filmed. You can watch it on our YouTube channel . 

Have we become a nation of strangers? In Dragonfly, neglected pensioner Elsie (Brenda Blethyn) finds an unexpected ally in her younger neighbour Colleen (Andrea Riseborough). Over time, Elsie gains a friend and the troubled Colleen finds a fresh purpose in life as she shops, cleans and cares for her. It brings brighter days for both of them.  Dragonfly is a well-crafted slow burner anchored by out...

Join us for an evening of screenings and a live Zoom conversation with Ken Loach as he discusses some of his most controversial and suppressed films - works that TV networks and other institutions have tried to keep from the public. We will discuss The Gamekeeper, The Navigators, The Save The Children Fund Film, Which Side Are You On?, and A Question of Leadership. Films that revealed the complici...

Lebanon in the UK: Diaspora Shorts was a programme of short films by 5 (women) Lebanese filmmakers based in the UK, part of our season: New Lebanese Cinema: Reclaiming Storytelling. The season is focused on contemporary filmmaking in Lebanon which sees a new generation of directors telling authentic stories of life on the ground, eschewing as much as possible some of the constraints of European fi...

The Greek actress, best known for Yorgos Lanthimos' Alps, Dogtooth, and The Lobster, and currently to be seen in Mahdi Fleifel's To A Land Unknown, discusses Yannis Oukonomides' Matchbox and Greek cinema with Erifili Missiou, the curator of the Garden Cinema's Contemporary Greek Cinema: Beyond the Weird Wave season. 

A special event to mark the re-publication by leading London independent press  Prototype of a facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s early, extremely rare and only poetry book A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, originally published in 1972 Joining publisher Jess Chandler and editor Gareth Evans are poet and writer CAConrad and scholar Declan Wiffen. With thanks to James Mackay. More podcast episodes can...

A creative biography of the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. One of the most important women in British modern art, the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a highly inspirational figure, whose work was deeply impacted by a pivotal event in her life.     A Sudden Glimpse into Deeper Things feature documentary is Mark Cousins' love letter to Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a significant yet often o...

Director Khalid and lead actor Rizwan joined us for a post-film Q&A to discuss researching and shooting In Camera with host Fatima Serghini and the Garden Cinema audience. 

Nida Manzoor, creator of the BAFTA, Peabody, and Rose d’Or award winning sitcom We Are Lady Parts, made her feature directorial debut with Polite Society. This exuberant feminist action comedy, turns genre etiquette on its head whilst examining the complexities of navigating life as a British-Pakistani teenager.  Actress Priya Kansara who plays the lead part of Ria joins film theorist and lecturer...

Young people took to the streets with political muralism all over Chile in the late 60s, at the same time that young people in New York were starting modern graffiti, and May 68 took place in Paris. Chile Estyle is a documentary film which explores the past and present of Chile's unique street art tradition, which comes from a remix of political muralism and graffiti, and has been part of Chilean...

Ernesto (Armando Espitia) is a young Guatemalan anthropologist tasked with identifying the bones of the people killed by the military government in the 1980s. One day, while hearing the account of an old woman, he thinks he has found a lead that might guide him to his father, a 'guerrillero' who went missing during the war. Meanwhile, his mother Cristina (Emma Dib), is about to testify at the tria...

AWAN partnered with The Arab Film Club to present Another Reality: Genre Shorts by Arab Women Filmmakers, here at the Garden Cinema, a programme curated by Sarah Agha. AWAN is the UK’s only contemporary multi-arts festival dedicated to showcasing inspiring works from Arab female artists. Sarah discusses the shorts with their respective directors, and the growth of genre cinema in the Arab world mo...

Journalist and critic Sophie Monks Kaufman discussed the The Zone Of Interest with the Garden Cinema's Joe Miller. Sophie and Joe talk in-depth about all the inception of the film, the cinematography, the many layers and themes the film evokes, history, resonance, resistance and the dehumanisation of others.   

...OR, THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE RISE AND FALL OF THE WORLD'S WILDEST CINEMA AND HOW IT INFLUENCED A MIXED-UP GENERATION OF WEIRDOS AND MISFITS     A feature-length big screen documentary telling the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll repertory cinema which inspired a generation during Britain's turbulent Thatcher years. Journalist Saskia Baron discusses the history of...

We discuss new forms of storytelling, genre, Afrofuturism and conversations around storytelling amongst the Black diaspora with writer Irenosen Okojie who curated the Black To The Future festival. We are very pleased to be showing two of the programme's films here at the Garden Cinema. We strive to expand the reach of the films we show and look forward to introducing new and original work to our m...

Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, tells the story of Syrian refugees relocated in a old mining village in the Northeast of England, amidst poverty, resentfulness and anger. As ever, Loach’s message is one of compassion and hope. Dave Turner who plays the lead character of TJ Ballantyne, the pub landlord, joined us at the Garden Cinema for a chat with journalist Steve Topple (whose voice you might recognise...

Alborada teamed up with the Garden Cinema to show the documentary Chicago Boys, which explores the  The film tells the story of the Chicago Boys, a group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago, under Milton Friedman returned to their country after Augusto Pinochet's coup to become the main architects of the neoliberal economic model in Chile, which also served as a template...

Every winter Mikma and her family travel by foot from their village deep in the Himalayas of Nepal to sell local medicinal plants in urban markets. This year, construction of a new highway to China has begun in their roadless valley, and things are never going to be the same.   The documentary film Baato, distributed by Tull Stories is at once a sensitive portrait of a family that has thus far exi...

We were joined by director Dionne Edwards, producer Georgia Goggin and editor Andonis Trattos, the team behind Pretty Red Dress, a BFI-distributed gem of a film currently on here at the Garden Cinema for a post-screening chat with our audience.  Join us to delve behind the scenes of this wonderfully nuanced and upbeat film, as we chat about filming in South London, Natey Jones' gracefulness on scr...