PROGRAMME
Planned films for the Year 2026/27
Doors open at 7.00pm and all films start at 7.30pm, unless otherwise stated
20 November 2026
Hen
Greece 2025
Tragedy/Comedy/Drama
Dir: Gyorgy Palfi
Cert: 15
1 hour 36 minutes
This compelling, original film, told from the perspective of a hen, was only made because Hungarian film-maker György Pálfi could no longer create anything in his home country. Orbán’s 16 years of cronyism banished any chance of funding a film in Budapest, so Pálfi was driven into exile. Searching for a universal story he could tell even when filming in a culture or country he didn’t fully understand, he and co-writer and partner Zsófia Ruttkay settled on a biopic of a factory-farmed chicken.
The hen escapes her gruesome, industrial birthplace in Greece and, through her naturally comic beady eyes, we witness the unfolding of a modern-day Greek tragedy, whereby a down-at-heel restaurateur is drawn into the brutal world of people-smuggling.
How Pálfi manages to pull this off is a cinematic mystery, but it probably has to do with his light tonal touch and his ability to truly empathise with his avian heroine without resorting to anthropomorphic sentimentalism. This hen acts much like a real chicken in that she combines shrewd survival instincts and utter gormlessness to a winning degree. For example, after surviving the Greek battery farm where she hatches (a wee black speck in a sea of yellow chicks), she manages to escape the clutches of a trucker who plans to make dinner out of her. Just when you think she has found safety, a fox (amazingly well trained, and apparently not CGI) starts stalking her, chasing her into a busy road where the chicken literally crosses the road with the blithe idiocy that makes chickens so adorable. The fox isn’t so lucky. Incidentally, the film does have a disclaimer at the end averring that no animals were harmed during the making of the movie, which is a relief.
The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.
11 December 2026
The President's Cake
Iraq 2025
Drama
Dir: Hasan Hasid
Cert: 12A
1 hour 45 minutes
There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour, despite sanctions and the consequent shortage of every single cake-making ingredient.
Among the largely nonprofessional cast is the unselfconsciously excellent Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as nine-year-old Lamia, whose greedy teacher gobbles the apple she has brought to school for her lunch. This blowhard announces that the class must draw lots for which of them will bake the Saddam cake; it falls to Lamia. In addition, her pal – who has a crush on Lamia – has to supply the fruit for this party, on which only the teacher will be gorging himself. Lamia sets off into town with her grandmother on a desperate shopping expedition, carrying her pet cockerel, Hindi, who gives a great animal performance and whose unpredictable crowings clearly forced the actors to improvise lines around him.
They encounter a succession of vivid characters, including the postman who gives Lamia and Bibi a lift in his car and gets very excited about their mission: “I adore cake! It’s the greatest invention in human history!”
But throughout the film there are placards and posters of Saddam - there is hardly a street scene that isn’t complicated by a demonstration wielding Saddam posters and barging past the camera shouting their loyalty. This is, after all, life during wartime. The postman’s other passenger is a man blinded by an American bomb who is engaged to be married to someone he hasn’t seen, so it doesn’t matter if she isn’t beautiful.
The film saunters and meanders along, accelerating occasionally to a mad dash for the many scenes in which the children are being chased by grownups. The cake-tasting itself turns out to be an explosively important climax.
8 January 2027
There is Still Tomorrow
Italy 2023
Drama/Comedy
Dir: Paola Cortellesi
Cert: 15
1 hour 58 minutes
In this moving comedic drama set in postwar Rome, a working-class wife and mother dreams of a better future. It’s a winner of 6 Italian Academy Awards and became a phenomenon in Italy last year, taking more money than both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
In post-war Rome, a city celebrating peace but grappling with its aftermath, Delia struggles to make ends meet. At home, she endures a violent, domineering husband while nursing her angry father-in law and dreaming of a better future for her children. When a mysterious letter arrives, Delia begins to find the courage to challenge the oppressive patriarchy shaping her life - and to imagine change.
Part of the reason There's Still Tomorrow might have struck such a chord in Italy, however, is that the heroine, Delia, (also played by Cortellesi) suffers violent physical and emotional abuse by her husband. In the film, Delia is a housewife and mother living in poverty in 1946, the year Italian women first got to vote.
The film may be set in 1946, shot in black and white (a nod to classic Italian filmmakers of the period) and tackle a subject like domestic violence, but an ironic humour still pervades the story, something the filmmaker says she believes helped audiences relate to it.
29 January 2027
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Iran 2024
Crime/Drama
Dir: Mohammad Rasoulof
Cert: 15
2 hour 48 minutes
The Seed of the Sacred Fig wrenchingly pits an investigating judge and his wife against their two dissenting daughters, who are appalled by brutal crackdowns on protesters.
The parents and teenagers essentially inhabit different worlds that only overlap in their Tehran apartment, the primary setting of the film’s first half. Iman (Misagh Zare), the respectable-looking father, is rising in the ranks of the state judicial department, doing increasingly repressive work that we never see; his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), dotes upon him, and they savour the prospect of a bigger apartment and other rewards for his loyal service. But their daughters, university-age Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and younger Sana (Setareh Maleki), stay glued to social media videos of government attacks on protesters, shown repeatedly in harrowing clips in mobile phone-vertical shots.
Theirs is still a loving family, with warm memories - in one cosy scene, Mum and her girls groom and chat. But they’re primed for a generational clash, and the mounting dissonance between the young women’s democratic views and the parents’ hold-the-line conservatism becomes a microcosm of the archaic authoritarian regime ignoring its citizens’ will to be free. Rezvan and Sana are finally drawn directly into the turmoil of the latest protests when Rezvan’s friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), is wounded by a buckshot, and they smuggle her into the apartment for her safety.
This film deserves to be regarded on its own terms, as an eloquent record of, and warning to, a regime clinging to power at the expense of freedom.