This October, to mark Black History Month, the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in the UK, and following from our recent Francophone West African season, we’re filling our regular Musical Friday slots with music inspired films, documentaries, and musicals that explore Caribbean culture and history.
Our mini-season begins on these shores with an extremely rare cinema screening of Steve McQueen’s magnificent and joyful Lovers Rock (2020) on 6 October. This screening is free and included in the ticket for our Garden Cinema house party. Our very own Blues Party is in partnership with Lin Kam Art and will see contemporary sets from the next generation of British DJ talent as well as Linett Kamala herself spinning lover’s rock and classic dub from a vintage soundsystem provided by Audio Gold in our bar – stocked with Red Stripe, Guinness, rum, and maybe even a Cherry B…
The UK’s leading black music expert and author Lloyd Bradley (Sounds Like London, Bass Culture) will be on hand on 13 October to introduce a screening of the enduring Jamaican classic, The Harder They Come (1972), fresh from 50th anniversary screenings last year, and the centrepiece of Lloyd’s ‘From Jamaica to the World: Reggae on Film’ season for the BFI in 2022.
Described by bfi.org as ‘the African musical masterpiece you’ve never seen’ (and featuring in the recent Sight and Sound greatest films of all-time list), Med Hondo’s West Indies (1979) is a wholly unique and utterly astonishing Brechtian depiction and critique of colonial rule in the French West Indies. This UK premiere of a new digital restoration on 20 October will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Theatrum Mundi co-director, curator, and poet, Labeja Kodua, and featuring Dr Sarah Jilani (City, University of London), and curator Abiba Coulibaly. The full list of panellists will be announced shortly.
The journey concludes on 27 October with the recent restoration and rediscovery of Kavery Kaul’s essential, nostalgic, and infectious document of the 1986 Trinidad and Tobago carnival, told through Calypso legends Lord Kitchener and Calypso Rose, One Hand Don’t Clap (1991). We’ll be pumping Soca and Calypso in the bar and serving up Dr Gee’s notorious rum punch all evening. Kavery Kaul herself will beam in via technology for a post screening Q&A/carnival memory sharing session.
Mike Leigh and Gary Yershon continue our season of live conversations, discussing his 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky.
Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is an irrepressibly cheerful primary school teacher who won’t let anyone or anything get her down. Living with her flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), Poppy has a gift for making the most of life. Determined to learn to drive, she finds herself matched with Scott (Eddie Marsan), an uptight driving instructor who is everything she is not.
For our second ever industry panel and members’ networking event, we were joined by Christina Papasotiriou (Senior Film Programmer at Raindance Film Festival) and Philip Ilson (Co-Director of the London Short Film Festival) who spoke with our own Abla Kandalaft to discuss all things film festivals.
Having started film programming in community cinemas, Christina Papasotiriou was Genesis Cinema’s Alternative Programming Manager where she brought the best of independent film to the people of East London as well as showcased work from underrepresented filmmakers; this translated to her leading the programming of the first edition of Genesis Cinema’s own Fragments Festival, which focuses on championing inclusivity though film. Currently Christina is the Senior Programmer at Raindance Film Festival, as well as part of team EFN – Emerging Filmmaker’s Night short film festival – which similarly to Raindance showcases early work from emerging directors.
Philip Ilson is the Co-Director of the London Short Film Festival, which he co-founded in 2004. He was also the short film programmer for the BFI London Film Festival between 2006 and 2022, and has worked as a freelance programmer, including at the East End Film Festival (London), Cork Film Festival (Ireland), and the Branchage Festival (Jersey), Latitude music festival, and at Curzon Soho Cinema.
Mike Leigh and Gary Yershon continue our season of live conversations, discussing his 1999 film Topsy-Turvy.
Mike Leigh’s dramatisation of the staging of the 1885 comic opera The Mikado stars Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner. A lushly produced epic about the harsh realities of creative expression, featuring bravura performances and Oscar-winning costume design and makeup.
Every winter Mikma and her family travel by foot from their village deep in the Himalayas of Nepal to sell local medicinal plants in urban markets. This year, construction of a new highway to China has begun in their roadless valley, and things are never going to be the same.
The documentary film Baato, distributed by Tull Stories, is at once a sensitive portrait of a family that has thus far existed largely apart from the trappings of modernity, a fascinating chronicle of the epic journey they embark on each year, and a penetrating depiction of the culture and politics of Nepal.
The Garden Cinema’s Joe Bond talks to co-director Lucas Millard during a satellite Q&A following a screening of the film.
Our South Asian Heritage Month: Stories to Tell continues with a screening of Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s neo-realist inspired debut feature which revolutionised Indian cinema and unveiled his enduring artistic voice to the world.
Anupma is a British-Indian film curator and archives researcher, with a deep and evolving interest in colonial & post-colonial screen narratives. Her curatorial practice is focussed on researching, screening and creating conversations around heritage films, with aim of making them accessible to a wider audience, both within and outside the UK. Her other interests include, Black-British cinema, Post-war Japanese Cinema, Indian Parallel Cinema, and Iranian New-wave Cinema.
Asif Kapadia joins Richard Vitola-Jones for a Q&A about his first feature documentary Senna, kicking off The Garden Cinema’s Summer of Sport documentary season. Covering Kapadia’s inspirations, the links with his other films Amy and Diego Maradona, and how the structure of the film brings presence and drama to the screen.
Spanning a decade of Formula One from 1984, Senna picks through archive footage to show a world where traditional driving skills are under threat from the unsporting forces of big business and technical engineering. A gifted newcomer, Senna goes from anonymity at the back of a rain-soaked debut at Monaco to three-time world champion -earning him legendary status in Brazil and igniting the hopes of a struggling population along the way.
Our Hitchcock odyssey concludes with arguably his most fertile period: an inspired decade-long stretch during which he made some of Hollywood’s most beloved movies. Of the titles shown here, Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), and North by Northwest (1959) feature in the top 50 of Sight and Sound’s recent greatest films of all time poll, with The Birds (1963) also listed in the top 200. Alongside this pantheon of classics are perhaps the lightest of his late works, To Catch a Thief (1955), and the only instance of Hitch reworking Hitch, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).