Lansdown Hall & Gallery

Film Club

22nd January
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
The Skin I Live In
2011
Dir Pedro Almodovar

Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault.

In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice.

And as for the human guinea pig...

Click here to watch the trailer

12th February
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
Project Nim
2011
Dir James Marsh

From the Oscar-winning team behind Man On Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child.

Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human.

What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

26th February
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
Melancholia
2011
Dir Lars von Trier

"A beautiful movie about the end of the world".

On the day of her wedding, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) leaves her seemingly perfect fiancé at the altar and quits her job at an advertising agency. As Justine battles with her uncomprehending sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and confronts her personal existential crisis, existence itself is placed in jeopardy by an approaching meteor which portends a catastrophic celestial collision.

Placing personal anguish on the same level as cosmic destruction, von Trier boldly undermines the clichés of his end-of-the-world scenario and takes aim at some of the fundamental questions of existence.

11th March
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
The Bicycle Thief
1948
Dir Vittorio De Sica
A landmark Italian neorealist drama that became one of the best-known and most widely acclaimed European movies, including a special Academy Award as "most outstanding foreign film" seven years before that Oscar category existed. The film features all the hallmarks of the neorealist style: a simple story about the lives of ordinary people, outdoor shooting and lighting, non-actors mixed together with actors, and a focus on social problems in the aftermath of World War II.

Lamberto Maggiorani plays Antonio, an unemployed man who finds a coveted job that requires a bicycle. When it is stolen on his first day of work, Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) begin a frantic search, learning valuable lessons along the way. The movie focuses on both the relationship between the father and the son and the larger framework of poverty and unemployment in postwar Italy.

As in such other classic films as Shoeshine (1946), Umberto D. (1952), and his late masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), De Sica focuses on the ordinary details of ordinary lives as a way to dramatize wider social issues. As a result, The Bicycle Thief works as a sentimental study of a father and son, a historical document, a social statement, and a record of one of the century's most influential film movements.

12th February
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
Wuthering Heights
2011
Dir Andrea Arnold

In Emily Brontë's novel, a Yorkshire farmer on a visit to Liverpool finds a homeless boy on the streets and takes him home to live as part of his family at their isolated moorland farm. The boy develops an all-consuming relationship with the farmer's daughter, and provokes jealousy and resentment from her brother in a tale of obsessive love and class division that has already inspired such cinematic luminaries as Wyler, Rivette and Buñuel.

Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) brings a timeless universality to the story, and has succeeded in making Heathcliff and Cathy, two of literature's best known characters, feel entirely fresh and new. While respectful of the original text, this is a decidedly radical interpretation, not least in its casting of young unknowns in the lead roles. Equally original is the film's breathtaking visual style; for while there is no shortage of filmed versions of Yorkshire's wild and windy moors, it's unlikely you will ever have seen them so bleakly and beautifully captured as here.

22nd April
Doors open 7:30pm | Film 8:00pm
The Deep Blue Sea
2011
Dir Terence Davies

This deeply-felt drama unfolds in London in the 1950s, a time of rationing and privation as Britain struggles through the aftermath of the Second World War.

Hester Collier (Rachel Weisz) leads a privileged life as the beautiful wife of High Court judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale), though theirs is a companionable rather than a passionate marriage. When Hester meets a young ex-RAF pilot, Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), she falls devastatingly in love with him, and to the shock of those around her she leaves her marriage to live with him in shabby lodgings.

But as time passes, Hester comes to realise that the dashing but damaged Freddie is unable to return her all-consuming passion, just as she is unable to return her husband's love.

Lansdown Film Club meets on the second and fourth Sunday of the month.
For all Film Club enquiries - or to give your suggestions for future films - please email filmclub@lansdownhall.org
Membership - £2 (annual) Tickets £6, £5 concs, £3 under 20's. New members always welcome!