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
12 December 2025
The Marching Band
France 2025
Drama
Dir: Emmanuel Courcol
Cert: 15
1 hour 43 minutes
This film may not surprise, but it’s a sincere and uplifting tale that is in tune with the spirit of underdog crowd-pleasers Brassed Off and The Full Monty. French film-maker Emmanuel Courcol serves up a good-natured heartwarmer with some syrup, but also two watchable and robust lead performances in Pierre Lottin and Benjamin Lavernhe.
Although a brass band plays a not unimportant role here, The Marching Band is at heart the story of two brothers, Thibaut and Jimmy, who, having been separately adopted as children, had been unaware of each other's existence. One of them lives a humble life in a small town in the north of France being now divorced and working in the cafeteria of a colliery which has a band of its own in which he plays trombone. The other brother has in contrast become a celebrity and, now in his thirties, is well established internationally as a conductor of classical music. Consequently, The Marching Band is able to feature not only band music (the colliery band is set to take part in a competitive event for which they are learning the Grand March from Aïda), but we witness too scenes that include extracts from popular classics by such composers as Mozart and Debussy. For that matter we also hear some jazz records briefly since both brothers love that music too.
However, while music plays a prominent and appealing role, the relationship between the newly acquainted brothers is at the centre of the film. The bond quickly becomes a strong one because Thibaut has only tracked down Jimmy through DNA due to an urgent need for a bone marrow transplant and, as a sibling offers the best chance of success. As the brothers get to know each other, it also becomes apparent that Jimmy is coming to realise how much he has been disadvantaged by not having the same adoptive parents as Thibaut.
9 January 2026
Reality
USA 2023
Drama
Dir: Tina Satter
Cert: 12A
1 hour 23 minutes
On a Saturday afternoon, in June 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old in cut-off jeans, is confronted at her Georgia home by the FBI. A cryptic conversation begins and Reality's life quickly begins to unravel.
The script, by Satter and her co-writer James Paul Dallas, is drawn exclusively from conversations between Reality Winner, who works as a US National Security Agency (NSA) translator, and the FBI agents who turned up at her home, to talk to her. It’s a troubling, unsettling and beautifully made production, all the more notable for being a debut feature that rigidly adheres to the actual recording that the FBI men made on the day to a brave young woman. Much of the tension arises from the imbalance between this chirpy, headlamp-eyed young woman (played by Sydney Sweeney) and the grimly imposing men, including her interrogators Justin (Josh Hamilton) and Wallace (Marchánt Davis), who crowd into her shoebox bungalow and manhandle her dainty possessions, including her cat and dog. Working within the confines of what was actually said and done, Satter still manages to create emotional aptitude in what could have been a rather stale true crime story. This is undoubtedly one of the more underrated films of 2023. We would suggest our Members resist from any further research into the film so that you are unprepared for the unravelling story.
30 January 2026
A New Kind of Wilderness
Norway 2024
Documentary
Dir: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen
Cert: 12
1 hour 24 minutes
A beautiful film of an off-grid family shattered by bereavement. When photographer Maria Vatne died in 2019, her family had to come to terms with not just the loss of a parent but a whole lifestyle, including their home.
This sad and beautiful documentary from Norwegian film-maker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen tells a painful, complicated story. It’s a story that the director appeared to have chanced upon through following the blog of the brilliant photographer, Maria Vatne, who recorded her idyllic wilderness existence living on a farm in Norway with her British husband Nik Payne and their three home schooled children Ulv, Falk and Freja, and an elder daughter Ronja, from Maria’s previous partner.
Throughout the film the children bring spontaneous joy, humour and lively play into the story. They joke about each other and their Dad and to his dismay are thrilled by a game on the school iPad they introduce into their device free home.
The film, with heartfelt sweetness, finally shows the children starting to grow up and move on, while for Nik it is not so easy. And then, over the closing credits, the director springs what is effectively a brilliant, subtle, extra-textual coup de cinema; she directs the audience to Maria’s website, perhaps in the knowledge that they might well read Maria’s blogpost from June 2016, called The Letting Go, which will send you back to watch the film all over again. A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.
8 February 2026
Afternoon
TFS Special
American Graffiti
We will show the film ‘American Graffitti’ with an accompanying talk and discussion by Dr Brian Edgar, former Professor of English Literature - a fascinating speaker who has visited us before. He proposes that the film is one of the most misunderstood in the whole Hollywood canon. It’s regularly called a ‘coming of age’ film, although none of the characters actually come of age. It’s often said to ‘seal off’ the events of 1962 from the later developments that destroyed the ‘innocence’ of that time, but in fact it’s full of hints of what was to come, and these grow more insistent as the film progresses.
Free to Members - be prepared for a thoughtful session, with an amazing track list of music from that era - a great way to spend a chilly February Sunday afternoon.
20 February 2026
When Autumn Falls
France 2025
Drama
Dir: Francois Ozon
Cert: 15
1 hour 55 minutes
That amazingly prolific film-maker François Ozon returns with an intriguing, mystery drama about a suspected murder. In it, the implied Chabrol-esque horror is made to coexist with an odd mood of gentleness and even sentimentality as we witness the loneliness of an ageing woman with secrets and regrets in the autumn of her life.
This is Michelle, played by 81-year-old actor-director Hélène Vincent. She lives in the countryside, near her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), whose grownup son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) is nearing the end of a prison term.
As soon as you enter the world of When Autumn Falls it has an old-fashioned, simple sensibility which is surprisingly comforting. François Ozon moves the film with a quiet grace and patience, making it a slow-burn drama with issues bubbling under the surface. And there’s a dark sense of humour that quietly lingers throughout the film, creating odd comedic moments and looks between characters which add a quirky note to When Autumn Falls’s personality. That’s then complemented by its strong visual throughout, the cinematography from Jérôme Alméras really leans into the film’s love of the countryside. It has a rich colour palette, the location choices are excellent, the atmosphere is compelling in an earnest way.
In the end the audience is left to put together their own conclusions - along the lines of Anatomy of a Fall.
13 March 2026
Crossing
Georgia 20234
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
Riceboy Sleeps
Canada 2022
Family Drama
Dir: Anthony Shim
Cert: PG
1 hour 57 minutes
There comes a time in many lives when a kind of matter transference takes place in the relationship between parent and child. Like a sudden change of filter or aspect ratio, we see our mothers and fathers in new ways, realising they existed before we did, thought thoughts and felt feelings entirely separate from our own. Almost always, it’s a flower of understanding that blossoms just a bit later than we would like and when it does, it asks of us an impossible question: what to do with this new knowledge, this strange flood of retrospective awe? Perhaps, when you’re far on the other side, looking back through the reverse end of time’s telescope, and if you’re Canadian director Anthony Shim, you make a film like Riceboy Sleeps, a familiar immigrant song sung in such an elegant, sincere voice that it feels like a whole new arrangement.
There’s a drifting, dreamed quality to Shim’s movie, which has been quietly collecting plaudits since its premiere in Toronto. It’s a mood established right from the storybook beginning, when, over hazy sea and mountain ‘scapes, a Korean voiceover tells of an orphan, abandoned as a baby at a temple, who grew into a strong young woman, who fell in love with a rice-farmer’s son.
The film is sedate and respectful and hardly reinvents the immigrant drama wheel. But in its soulful, expertly crafted simplicity it does ring with the sincerest and most moving of sentiments that a grown-up child could express to a beloved parent: I remember it all, and thank you.
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.