Keswick Film Festival

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"It's difficult to think of the moments before a heartbreak and not lace them with omens. The mind, too often, moulds memories into prophecies. Colours get dialled up. Emotions solidify. It's a hard thing to talk about, let alone visualise. That's why 'Aftersun', the debut of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, is so astounding. She's captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.

Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is on holiday with her dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), at a point in the Nineties when the Macarena was at its cultural apex. It's made clear that Calum isn't with Sophie's mother anymore. He moved to England; they stayed in Scotland. This trip to Turkey, which Calum can barely afford, is a rare opportunity for father and daughter to be together.

Except we’re not watching these events as they were, but as they're remembered – by an older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) under the strobe lights of a nightclub or a rave or, really, the chaotic confines of her own brain. We also see her play and replay an old VHS tape from the trip, trying to pinpoint some hidden truth… this shared time between Sophie and Calum marked the end of... something..." – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent.

As the recent winner of five of the British Independent Film awards, including Best Film and Best Director, this reviewer is not alone; 95% of Rotten Tomatoes critics liked it, many of them giving it 5 stars.

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Originally called 'Corset', this period drama puts a finger up to other period dramas just as Empress Elisabeth of Austria tries to do as she turns 40 and is deemed to be 'old': she refuses to accept this and wears her corset tighter each day to keep her figure and beauty as it has been, whilst finding more and more ways to keep her status in society and not be consigned to irrelevance. "Elisabeth toys with avoidance tactics and schemes to get herself out of the daily royal performance she is expected to endure. On a quest for personal freedom, she travels to England and Bavaria where former lovers once taught her to ride horses and embrace her liberty. She poses for portraits dressed in ball gowns with white fur trim and red jewels, smoking lilac Sobranies – a vision in kitsch" – Caitlin Guinlan, Little White Lies.

Elisabeth has had many dramas and documentaries made about her ever since she was alive and this is one of five films made in the last two years; she was to her time what Diana was to ours.

"What is rewarding about this picture, however, is the way that it interrogates her iconic status. By focusing on the Empress in middle age (or old age, given that forty was the average life expectancy for Austrian women in the late 19th century), the film touches on the loss of status of a woman who was valued almost entirely for her appearance. But more interestingly, it also suggests that aging can be a release, capturing that liberating, relatable moment of realisation that she is finally running out of f---s to give" – Wendy Ide, Screen International.

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We are showing this film as part of the Alhambra MINT Chinese Film Festival.

"After Her college graduation, Yezi comes back home to spend her last summer vacation with her grandmother. The house is filled with grandma's memories that gradually begin to take shape in reality. Her grandma slips into the abyss of amnesia and time begins to lose meaning. Haunted by those memories, Yezi finds herself wandering among fragments of her family history." – Keswick Alhambra.

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Hasna and Mariam are sisters, aged 9 and 7, running wild on the streets of Paris from a mother who doesn't want them. They are eventually sent to live in different foster homes, when Hasna's story (based on real life) takes a huge turn for the worst. "Traumatized by her past and the wrenching way Mariam was taken from her, Hasna copes by splintering off her identities — Moroccan immigrant, Parisian party girl, sexual libertine, tomboyish hothead — even as she desperately seeks to integrate them in the form of home and family. Using three actresses to play the adult Hasna, including Amer herself, the filmmaker gracefully dramatizes dissociation, both as a survival mechanism and as an increasingly fraught form of acting out... Hasna emerges as a fascinating but also troubling screen heroine, a courageous protector of the defenseless whose instincts have nowhere to go when Mariam disappears from her life." – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post.

You will have to come to see it to find out what happens to her, but the director Dina Amer uses documentary techniques as well as some clever effects to follow the changing life of this splintered character. If I say any more I will spoil it for you...

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A young woman attends the trial of another woman as research for her own project, but gradually comes unstuck as her own emotional chords are struck. "Documentarian Alice Diop's narrative debut 'Saint Omer' is a visually arresting courtroom set drama that explores the similarities (and distinct differences) between two young women of Senegalese descent living in France. Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist, feels drawn to the story of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a young woman on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter. Both women are academically inclined, with complicated relationships to their own mothers. Both women occupy a liminal space between Senegal and France. While Rama is shown as an accepted academic, Laurence is continually othered, with those observing the trial shocked at her “sophisticated” command of French (to which Rama tells her agent she just sounds like any other educated woman.)" – Marya E Gates, RogerEbert.com.

"Although technically a work of fiction, 'Saint Omer' is fiercely documentary-like in its concerns. The questions it conjures are not the anticipated emotional ones, rather they challenge the audience, asking: what expectations do we carry about a person like Laurence? Do we want to believe that she is evil? Crazy? Is she the product of a 'foreign' culture? Is there someone else in her life that we could pin this on?" – Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire.

Nominated for many awards, this could lead to a very interesting 'outro' in Keswick!

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You are very poor and desperate for more money. Your father is very ill – dying - and there is nothing you can do to help his suffering. A gangster on the run comes along and offers you money to hide in your isolated house for some time, but the deal is that he replaces your father... what would you do? This might have made a great story just like that, but director/writer Carolina Markowicz has gone one further by adding humour.

"The stereotypes of sophisticated drug kingpin and naïve rural dwellers are turned on their heads in Carolina Markowicz's lively deadpan comedy, which screened as part of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Rather than playing it as a straight culture clash, Markowicz introduces farcical elements as it emerges that country life is anything but simple, explores the clash of masculine egos between the privileged mobster and Irene's much more temperamental, frequently inebriated husband Jairo, and observes Miguel's gradual disintegration as the waiting game becomes more Kafkaesque' – Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film.