Akinola Davies Jr. stopped by The Garden Cinema a couple of days after winning a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer/Director for the film My Father’s Shadow. Here he talks about the importance of supporting independent cinemas and how he got his early breaks in filmmaking.
Director Kaouther Ben Hania and producer James Wilson talk about their docu-drama film that follows Red Crescent volunteers who receive an emergency call from Hind Rijab, a 6-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. The film uses actors and recordings from the calls made at the time. Hosted by Fatima Serghini.
Recorded on 26th November 2025 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street, London WC2B 5PQ
Robbie Taylor Hunt and Adelaide Waldrop discuss intimacy coordination and what it entails, hosted and moderated by The Garden Cinema’s very own Alix Austin, film director and multimedia artist.
Robbie Taylor Hunt’s work has focused on queer intimacy and his film credits include Pillion, Femme and Red, White & Royal Blue. Adelaide Waldrop’s credits include Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Mickey 17, Blade Runner 2099, and Get Millie Black. Alix Austin’s debut film, Kill Your Lover, is a toxic relationship body horror with a strong focus on interpersonal drama and available to watch on Amazon Prime and SHUDDER.
Garden Cinema Industry panels are a series of events that cover what it’s like to work in the film industry, spanning a range of crafts and skills. Members are able to ask questions and then meet and mingle with industry professionals in The Garden Bar.
Recorded on 18th February 2026 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ
A trailer for our upcoming film season, celebrating the career of the great Jeanne Moreau.
Moreau epitomised European cinema in the 1960s and 70s. She embodied the protagonists of scripts by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Genet, starring in masterpieces by François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
She played diverse roles that subverted gender expectations, including a woman who abandons her husband and daughter for a younger man in The Lovers (1959), an alienated wife drifting through a crumbling marriage in La Notte (1961), and a woman complicit in murder wandering anxiously through the streets of Paris in Lift to the Scaffold (1958). Across her career, she inhabited characters who refused easy categorisation or moral judgement.
The season will be screening at The Garden Cinema from Saturday 21st March – 5th May 2026.
Novelist, LRB contributor and screenwriter Ronan Bennett (Top Boy, Public Enemies, The Day of the Jackal) joins Gareth Evans to discuss the golden-age British film noir Night and the City.
LRB Screen is the long-running film series from the London Review of Books, Europe’s leading literary journal of culture and ideas, hosted by the Garden Cinema since 2023.
Recorded on 9th February 2025 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ
Jia Zhangke Retrospective at The Garden Cinema 贾樟柯
On sale now: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/time-capsule-the-films-of-jia-zhangke/
Irene González-López introduces The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On as part of our continuing season of films, 1980s: The Lost Decade of Japanese Cinema
Recorded on 5th February 2026 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street, London WC2B 5PQ
Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop curator Keith Lodwick discusses the multi-award winning Merchant Ivory classic with the Fashion Film Club founder Sarah Bailey.
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 and impeccable comic timing, A Room With A View is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster’s characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention.
The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian Sands), Lucy’s life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside. (Merchant Ivory)
Curator of Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop at The Fashion and Textile Museum, London (until March 8th), Keith Lodwick is an expert on costume in Merchant Ivory films. A writer, curator and historian, Lodwick was formerly Curator of Theatre and Screen Arts at the V&A.