Film / News
Event Cinema for June 2016
Discover Arts: Teatro Alla Scala
This first in a new series of Discover Arts HD documentaries explores the history of Milan’s great performing arts venue. Over the last 238 years, it has played host to many of the greats from the worlds of classical music, opera and ballet. The roll of honour ranges from composer Giuseppe Verdi and conductor Arturo Toscanini to legendary tenor Placido Domingo and such lauded contemporary arts directors as Franco Zeffirelli and Patrice Chereau.
Screening June 2: Showcase Cinema De Lux
Paapa Essiedu takes the title role in The Two Gentlemen of Verona director Simon Godwin’s anniversary year production of the Bard’s great tragedy. Reviews have been extremely positive. “Paapa Essiedu paints a young and striking Hamlet, torn by indecision in an African military state, in Simon Godwin’s stirring interpretation,” enthused The Guardian. The play is broadcast live in HD to cinemas from Stratford-upon-Avon on June 8. Some cinemas have encore screenings on June 28.
Screening June 8: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Curzon, Orpheus, Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green, Cineworld Hengrove
Screening June 28: Showcase Cinema De Lux
Inside Number 9: A Quiet Night In + Q&A
Bristol’s Slapstick festival of silent and classic comedy presents the much-acclaimed, mostly wordless A Quiet Night In episode from season one of Inside Number 9. You remember: the brilliantly choreographed one in which Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith play a pair of hapless burglars who break into a modernist house. There’s additional knowing fun for silent movie enthusiasts in the casting of Oona Chaplin – granddaughter of Charlie – as one of the householders. The event will also include a Q&A session with the duo. Advance tickets, price £15, are available here. See our news story here for more.
Screening June 9: Arnolfini
Royal Opera House Live: Nabucco
Verdi’s third, reputation-defining opera gives it some serious choral welly. It’s based on the Biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco), who imprisons and subsequently exiles the Hebrews from their homeland. Daniele Abbado’s modern production was premiered back in 2013. Placido Domingo returns in the titular baritone role for this revival. This is the second screening in the 2016 BP Big Screens season, organised in partnership with the Royal Opera House. The pre-performance screening starts at 7pm and admission to Millennium Square is free but on a first come, first served basis. See our news story here for more information.
Screening June 9: Millennium Square
Recorded back in 2013 and re-released to mark Her Maj’s 90th, Peter Morgan’s Tony and Olivier Award-winning play is directed by Stephen Daldry. Helen Mirren takes the lead role as Mrs Windsor in a drama that imagines what took place during her private audiences with twelve Prime ministers, ranging from Churchill to Thatcher and Blair. The encore screening also includes an exclusive Q&A with Mirren and Daldry.
Screening June 9: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Cineworld Hengrove, Curzon, Orpheus, Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green, Everyman
Screening June 13: Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green
Yes, it’s veteran tubby provocateur Michael Moore on a mission to “make America great again”. Now where have we heard that before? Anyway, to achieve his aim, he sets out on a good-natured, globe-trotting invasion of superior nations bent on plundering all their good ideas. In Italy, he finds workers enjoying better sex lives and more holidays; French schoolchildren reject junk food to chow down on gourmet meals that cost less per head to produce than the crap served in US schools; Finland boasts the world’s number one school system; women have achieved pay parity with men in Iceland; Slovenia offers completely free university education and actively encourages overseas students, and so on. He doesn’t visit the UK. Draw your own conclusions. Naturally, Moore has been accused of pursuing an agenda and overlooking facts that prove inconvenient to his argument, but this has also been described as his most optimistic and mellow film yet. Alas, it proved to be his biggest ever box office flop in the US, where they presumably prefer the alternative recipe offered by that nice Mr. Trump – you know: building walls, kicking ass, etc. This screening will be followed by a satellite Q&A with Michael Moore broadcast live from the Sheffield Documentary Festival.
Screening June 10: Watershed, Showcase Cinema De Lux, Vue Cribbs Causeway, Everyman
Moonlight Movies: Kevin and Perry Go Large
Al fresco screening of the Harry Enfield comedy in Motion’s courtyard. Tickets are available here.
Screening June 10: Motion
This winner of several film festival awards, this 2007 US indie comedy-drama co-directed by Diane Crespo and Stefan C. Schaefer centres on two young women – one a devout Muslim, the other an orthodox Jew – who form a firm friendship while teaching at a public school in Brooklyn. They soon find that they have much in common, despite their different religious backgrounds – notably the fact that they’re each facing the prospect of an arranged marriage. This screening will be followed by a Q&A hosted by Ben Grove-White, a trustee of Salaam Shalom.
Screening June 12: Watershed
Moonlight Movies: Dirty Dancing
Nobody puts Baby in the corner in the Motion courtyard. Tickets are available here.
Screening June 12: Motion
Filmmakers Lily and Pete Sequoia embark on a year-long trundle round the UK in search of an alternative to consumption and alienation. They’ll be present for a Q&A about their crowd-funded film after this screening, which is part of Bristol Big Green Week.
Screening June 15: Cube
Discover Arts: Leonardo Da Vinci
An HD nose around last spring’s landmark Da Vinci exhibition in Milan’s historic Palazzo Reale. Exhibition curator Pietro Marni and sundry distinguished Leonardo boffins are on hand to explain all and explode a few myths. The film also promises to shed new light on the mystery of Leonardo’s life in Milan, where he spent eighteen years at the end of the fifteenth century.
Screening June 16: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Vue Cribbs Causeway
Bristol Bad Film Club: GetEven
Like many of the best bad films, GetEven (aka Road to Revenge) is the product of one filmmaker’s very distinctive vision. In this case, the filmmaker is LA attorney John De Hart. His dream was to become an action hero, so he decided to create a movie for himself, paying for the whole shebang out of his own pocket. Nobody could accuse him of being a shirker. De Hart not only starred in the film but also wrote, produced and directed it, as well as composing the soundtrack and singing his own love ballads over the sex scenes he wrote for himself (with Playboy playmate Pamela Jean Bryant, obviously). Oh, and he narrated the trailer too. The story? Well, De Hart casts himself as macho, impressively moustachioed all-American male Rick Bode, who’s irresistible to women (mostly because of his line-dancing skills). Clearly the baby-sacrificing martial arts Satanic cult he tussles with don’t stand a chance. Profits from this Bristol Bad Film Club screening go to One25. Advance tickets, price £5, are available here.
Screening June 16: Bierkeller
David Lean’s great epic explores the complex life and character of legendary, controversial British eccentric T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole). As a young British army officer stationed in Cairo during WWI, Lawrence is sent to assess the likelihood of Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) succeeding in his revolt against the Turks. His strategic genius unites rival tribes to win an extraordinary victory. Superbly photographed by Freddie Young and boasting a suitably stirring Maurice Jarre score, the film won seven Oscars in 1963, including Best Picture and Best Director. This screening is part of the Festival of Ideas‘ Middle East Day and will be introduced by Sir Christopher Frayling.
Screening June 18: Watershed
The Holy Mountain + live score
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s even-more-deranged follow-up to his cult El Topo also boasts plenty of surreal and blasphemetastic imagery, though you’d be hard pushed to come up with an explanation of what on earth he’s on about. Still, if you’ve a taste for armless dwarves, small birds emerging from gunshot wounds, and the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by costumed frogs and lizards, this is very much the movie for you. Watch out for Jodorowsky himself in amusing robes and huge hat as “the alchemist”. The Cube’s screening benefits from a live re-score by local psychedelicists Asteroid Deluxe, incorporating sounds from the original foley.
Screening June 19: Cube
Glyndebourne: The Barber of Seville
Lovelorn Count Almaviva is eager to lure beautiful and feisty Rosina away from her lecherous ward Dr. Bartolo, who keeps her firmly under lock and key. So he solicits the assistance of Figaro, the well-connected barber of Seville. Last staged at Glyndebourne back in 1982, Rossini’s ever-popular opera buffe returns in a new production that reunites the creative team behind the festival’s L’elisir d’amore: director Annabel Arden and conductor Enrique Mazzola. It also sees the return of two Glyndebourne favourites: lyric soprano Danielle de Niese as Rosina and Italian buffo baritone Alessandro Corbelli as Dr Bartolo. Award-winning young German baritone Bjorn Burger makes his Glyndebourne debut in the title role. This live broadcast is the first of three cinema screenings from Glyndebourne over the summer.
Screening June 21: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Orpheus, Vue Longwell Green, Vue Cribbs Causeway, Everyman
D’ya see what he did there? Choreographer Matthew Bourne’s loose “re-imagining” of Bizet’s Carmen relocates the opera from a 19th century Spanish cigarette factory to a greasy smalltown US diner in the 1960s. Lusty hoofing ensues. This performance was filmed live at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in August 2015.
Screening June 22: Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green
Splendid idea, this: the Cube is screening a pleasingly gruesome Turkish horror flick and then wheeling on a foley artist to reveal how all the hacking and slashing sound effects were achieved by abusing members of the vegetable community. Baskin, in case you’re wondering, is an all-out splatterfest in which a bunch of cops answer a distress call only to find themselves trapped in an abandoned building where they’re efficiently separated from their eyeballs, intestines, etc.
Screening June 23: Cube
A rare screening of the silent 1917 Italian version of Hamlet, which has been acclaimed by the few who’ve seen it as one of the greatest of all time. This 35mm BFI print is being screened in association with South West Silents as part of the Watershed’s impressively eclectic June Sunday brunch Shakespeare on Film season. There’s live piano accompaniment by composer Neil Brand, an introduction by film historian Luke McKernan, and a Q&A after the screening.
Screening June 23: Watershed
For the past three years, filmmaker and psychoanalyst in training Conor McCormack has documented Bristol Hearing Voices Network – a self-help group for people who hear voices and have other unusual experiences. His observational documentary In the Real explores the phenomenon by gaining access to a community of voice-hearers on the medicated margins of society to offer “a rare insight into the inner logic of each character’s madness through the intimate moments of the everyday”. This is the last of three films screened in the short Psychosis on Film season in collaboration with Bristol Health Partners to tie in with the launch of the Bristol Psychosis Health Integration Team, which aims to improve the support, treatment, services and lives of people with psychosis in the Bristol area. The screening will be introduced by Angela Woods from Hearing the Voice.
Screening June 27: Watershed
Royal Opera House Live: Werther
Glum poet Werther is asked to accompany bailiff’s daughter and all-round hottie Charlotte to the ball. Naturally, they fall in love, but Charlotte made her mother a deathbed promise that she would marry Albert. Now she’s glum too. Is that a tragedy looming on the horizon? Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) forms the loose basis of Jules Massenet’s four-act opera. Benoit Jacquot’s sumptuous new production for the ROH boasts a cast led by Vittorio Grigolo and Joyce DiDonato. Wielding the baton is Antonio Pappano.
Screening June 27: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Orpheus, Odeon, Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green, Everyman
The Importance of Being Earnest – Encore
A handbag?” Yep, Poirot himself gets to utter the immortal line as David Suchet drags up to play Lady Bracknell in Adrian Noble‘s production of Oscar Wilde‘s great satire on Victorian manners. The play was recorded live at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last October.
Screening June 29: Vue Cribbs Causeway, Vue Longwell Green, Showcase Cinema De Lux
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