Keswick Film Festival

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As a small child, Anna watches in horror as her family sell her grandfather's favourite 1000-year-old olive tree to help pay for a tourist restaurant.

Wind forward a dozen years and her grandfather has fallen into depression and dementia; does he miss his tree?

Anna discovers the tree has been bought by a Dusseldorf energy company as a symbol of its green policies; can she get it back?

What follows is her crazy mission, with a couple of friends, to go to Dusseldorf to rescue the tree, involving big business and the German environmental movement along the way.

The film is directed by Icíar Bollaín (we had her 'Even the Rain' here in 2012 and 'Take My Eyes' at the 2005 Festival) and written by her partner, multi-award winning Paul Laverty, Ken Loach's collaborator ('I, Daniel Blake', 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley'). Anna Castillo, who plays Anna, gets good reviews all round too, so this should be a treat for us all.

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If you have seen any Kelly Reichardt movies, you will know she wants to draw you into the characters, asking you to think about their lives and their reaction to events: "From her terrific debut feature 'River of Grass' through 'Meek's Cutoff' and 'Wendy and Lucy', Reichardt has given us incomplete, quietly suffering women who feel their way into change. Her M.O. is to allow their unexpressed longings to hang quietly in the air so we can feel them too, and watch what happens when they try to act on them" – Ella Taylor, NPR.

'Certain Women' lets us see into the lives of four women in windswept Montana. Firstly, we meet Laura - Laura Dern playing a small-town lawyer, frustrated by the men she represents not respecting her abilities and yearning for more from her life.

Then we see Gina (Michelle Williams) who is fighting her teenage daughter and trying to hold her family together while planning a new house.

Lastly, newcomer Lily Gladstone leaves her horses for a while to take an evening class, where she falls for the teacher, Kristen Stewart.

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Imagine you have been living in the same place for most of your adult life, in a beautiful spot with beautiful views (this should be pretty easy for us in Keswick!). Your life has been wrapped up, not just in the place, but in the building itself. Along comes a developer who sees a chance to make a fortune by knocking down your home and building a newer, flashier apartment block. He offers you lots of money to move; what would you do?

Well, everyone in Clara's beachside block in Recife has agreed to sell... but she wants to stay. A retired music critic, she loves it here and has no need of the money. The developer, and even her friends and family think she is mad and try to persuade her to move...

The film is not about a 'David and Goliath' fight over the flat though. It "turns out to be less about the twists and turns of Clara's story and more about the confounding experience of aging, the mind-body conundrum, and how the physical environment becomes such a potent signifier of time, memory and meaning" - Ann Hornaday, Washington Post. "...besides being a study of a woman under duress, the film is a portrait of a society where many traditional values, like its buildings, are at risk of being annihilated simply for the sake of modernity and money" - Geoff Andrew, Time Out.

The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it is Sonya Braga (made famous by her role in 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' back in 1985) who gets much credit for this: her "evident strength, intelligence and vitality are essential to the character of the embattled but stubborn Clara" - Geoff Andrew again.

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It is 1919, only a few weeks after the war has ended and the inhabitants of Quedlinburg - a small town in Germany - are trying to come to terms with losing the war and losing their loved ones. Anna cannot get over her fiancé, Frantz: she is even still living with his parents. She visits Frantz's grave every day. One day she sees a stranger placing flowers on the grave. He turns out to be Adrien...a Frenchman. What is he doing there? How did he know Frantz?

François Ozon has built a reputation around thought-provoking films that don't fit into any one genre, that often blur the boundaries of both gender and sexuality ('8 Women', 'Swimming Pool', 'Jeune & Jolie'). He is also famous for producing films fast, averaging more than one a year. 'Frantz' is different; it is based on a little-known 1932 film 'Broken Lullaby', though the second half is completely new, written by Ozon. A romantic mystery, it comes over as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo', "although Ozon being Ozon, every riff and tribute is upside down, back to front, and bilingual to boot" - Robbie Collin, Telegraph.

Anna and Frantz's family start off not trusting Adrien - even hating him as a Frenchman - but gradually they grow to like him as they find out how he knew Frantz. But is he telling the truth? Would knowing the truth help anyway? What should Anna do about her growing feelings for him?

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Catherine Frot plays Claire in the title role - a woman whose life is her work and her garden; and she is happy with that...until along comes her father's ex-mistress, Beatrice, who walked out 30 years ago. Played by Catherine Deneuve, Beatrice is the complete opposite of Claire - a freewheeling lush who gambles for a living and drinks wine with her breakfast. Why has Beatrice come back into Claire's life? Beatrice is impossible, "But the great Deneuve plays her with such endearing spirit, such an irreducible weave of dignity and desperation, that our exasperation is tempered with genuine affection... Frot has the trickier, more recessive role, one that might easily be underestimated by those who don’t know her as one of her country's nimblest comic talents" - Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times.

We get a great chance here to get to know them both.