PROGRAMME
Planned films for the Year 2025/26​
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Doors open at 7.00pm and all films start at 7.30pm, unless otherwise stated
13 March 2026
Crossing
Georgia 2024
Drama
Dir: Levan Akin
Cert: 15
1 hour 46 minutes
“I have no future and thus no plans. I’m just here until I’m not.” Stony-faced and severe, Lia, a retired schoolteacher from Batumi, Georgia, is not in the business of mincing words. But she’s not being entirely honest about her plans. There is one final thing that she hopes to achieve: she aims to track down her niece, Tekla, to make amends for failing her years before in a time of need.
Her quest takes her across the border to Istanbul; tagging along with her is Achi, an opportunist kid who has talked his way on to her trip as an interpreter, but really just sees her as a way of escaping his dead-end life in a Black Sea beach shack with his bullying brother. Following a series of false starts, and a few too many evenings of heavy drinking, the pair connect with Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans woman, lawyer and advocate for trans rights.
The haunting Turkish songs that underscore these episodes are similarly adaptable, plaintive in one moment and exultant the next. The greatest discoveries of all, though, may be among the cast, who are mostly unknowns and are uniformly outstanding.
Crossing takes all of us down paths that even the shrewdly observant Lia would be unable to predict, but that she’d be the first to appreciate. ​It's a heartbreaker in all the best ways.
17 April 2026
Touch
Iceland (UK english) 2024
Drama / Romance
Dir: Baltasar Kormakur
Cert: 15
2 hours 1 minute
Touch is vast in scope, stretching over decades, languages, continents, and cultures, with themes of memory, aging, loss, and love. But its sensibility is as exquisitely tender as the flutter of a butterfly wing.
Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) is an elderly widower and restaurant owner in Iceland who visits his doctor to talk about some diminishing of his memory and fine motor skills. The doctor orders an MRI and gently suggests that this might be a time for Kristófer to consider any unfinished business or any unresolved issues he may wish to address while he still can. This brings on a flood of memories of Kristófer’s first love when he dropped out of graduate school in London and went to work in a Japanese restaurant. He decides to go to London to see if he can find her 60 years later. This is all happening in March of 2020 when the world is shutting down in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his daughter makes increasingly worried and frustrated phone calls, but Kristófer does not have time to wait.
As he travels and investigates, we travel back and forth in time between the present and the past to see the young Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur) and Miko (Yôko Narahashi) in 1960s London.
The film’s embrace of compassion and forgiveness for everyone is heartwarmingly spacious. It shimmers with grace.
15 May 2026
Urchin
UK 2025
Drama
Dir: Harris Dickinson
Cert: 15
1 hour 39 minutes
Mike, a rough sleeper in London, is trapped in a cycle of self-destruction as he attempts to turn his life around. Raw and absurd, it's a story about the strange patterns that keep pulling us back.
Harris Dickinson makes a terrifically impressive debut here as a writer-director with this smart and compassionate picture about homelessness. It is engaging, sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory set-pieces, and challenges the notion of the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.
Frank Dillane is Mike, a guy who has spent five years living on the streets in London: begging, stealing, eating at charity food trucks. Dillane’s performance shows Mike’s nervy, twitchy, livewire mannerisms have been cultivated over what feels like a lifetime of abandonment: he has a kind of suppressed pleading quality as he asks passersby for the spare change that fewer people carry in these post-Covid times. His open smile has a learned survivalist determination, but what he has is not exactly charm. He is slippery and unreliable, but also intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
12 June 2026
Holy Cow
France 2024
Drama
Dir: Louise Courvoisier
Cert: 15
1 hour 32 minutes
PARTY - to be held in conjunction with film - details in due course!
After the tragic death of his father, 18 year old Totone is thrust into the unexpected and very adult role of looking after his younger sister and their failing family farm in the Jura section of France. He assumes even more responsibility when he enters a cash competition for the best Comte cheese made in this western part of the French Alps. A "verité" look at the hardscrabble life of French agriculture, it is simultaneously a moving love story and above all an ode to the love of cheese.
Ultimately, the comté is beside the point: the nourishment in this terrific, big-hearted drama comes from Courvoisier’s satisfyingly full-blooded characters.
There’s a knack to making great rural cinema, which boils down to capturing the grit and spit and personality of the place rather than some sun-dappled romantic projection of a simpler life. It helps immeasurably that Courvoisier grew up in the same remote Jura farming community in eastern France where the film is set. It shows in every rough-edged, beer-drenched frame – this is earthy, sweaty, unvarnished film-making with dirt under its nails – and in particular it benefits the casting and direction of the phenomenal, largely nonprofessional actors.
The film is a poignant, authentic teen drama, and was awarded a special, one-off “Youth Prize” at Cannes last year.