Hull Independent Cinema: GLORIA BELL

Hull Independent Cinema: GLORIA BELL

Gloria is a free-spirited divorcée who spends her days at a straight-laced office job and her nights on the dance floor, joyfully letting loose at clubs around Los Angeles. After meeting Arnold on a night out, she finds herself thrust into an unexpected new romance, filled with both the joys of budding love and the complications of dating, identity, and family.

From Academy Award-winning director Sebastian Lelio (A FANTASTIC WOMAN, DISOBEDIENCE) comes a sophisticated romantic comedy that shows love can strike at any time, relationships are never simple, and nothing can get you down as long as you keep dancing.

Starring Julianne Moore, Sean Astin, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Michael Cera, Alanna Ubach, John Turturro

Awards and Reviews
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Belfast Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival Selections

“Because of Moore’s open-hearted, captivating portrayal of the title character, repetition won’t be a drawback for those who’ve seen Gloria. She makes the role her own with brio and woman-power strength.” – The Toronto Star

“This is a quiet film, moving at its own pace, reflecting life with such realism it’s as if we’re invisible guests in Gloria Bell’s life.” – Chicago Sun-Times

Certificate
GLORIA BELL is rated 15.

HOME-Restart Productions in association with Drunk Animal

We are a Hull-based studio and we are proud to share with you our very first production, Home, featuring Ian Beattie, Lily Aslandogdu and Daniel Mihai.

Our first film ‘Home’ is a story of a lonely young girl who meets a Romanian farmhand who claims to be held captive. The issue of modern-day slavery is so massive in scale, many are unable to comprehend it or even acknowledge it. Our story attempts to ask the question: can she save him, or will his secret keep them both prisoner?

Screenings will take place in 3 different venues:
28/06 at the C4DI – private screening
18/07 at Thieving Harry’s – intimate public screening
02/08 at the Bonus Arena – private screening along with networking and a Q&A session

We look forward to seeing you at the screening and sharing this short story with you.

Image credited to Restart Productions

HOME – Restart Productions in association with Drunk Animal

We are a Hull-based studio and we are proud to share with you our very first production, Home, featuring Ian Beattie, Lily Aslandogdu and Daniel Mihai.

We look forward to seeing you at the screening and sharing this short story with you.

Pride on Screen: SOME LIKE IT QUEER event

Kick-off your Pride weekend with the classic drag comedy SOME LIKE IT HOT starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis to celebrate its 60th anniversary. Before the screening, we’ll discuss the film’s influence on drag in tv, film and popular culture and the state of drag queens (and kings!) in 2019. Celebrations will continue after the film, so come in your best Hollywood glamour drag!

The pre-screening discussion includes SOME LIKE IT HOT expert David N Eldridge, Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Hull University and Cheddar Gorgeous, member of Family Gorgeous and star of makeover series DRAG SOS which has its premiere on Tuesday 25 June on Channel 4.

The event will also feature appearances from local celebrity drag queens Fanny Ncentite, Regina Sparkles, Gloria Hole and Bobby Mandrell.

Synopsis
Two down on their luck jazz musicians find themselves out of a job and on the run after the police raid the speakeasy they perform in and they inadvertently stumble upon a gang war. With no money and nowhere to hide, a gig with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators at a Florida beach resort seems like the perfect getaway. There’s just one problem: the Syncopators are an all-female band, and Joe and Jerry aren’t women – yet.

Starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

Awards and Reviews
Winner – Best Costume Design, 1960 Academy Awards
Nominee – Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writing, 1960 Academy Awards
Winner – Best Comedy, Best Actress, Best Actor – 1960 Golden Globes

“Nobody’s perfect” is the last line but Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close. The pace is fast and the humour — especially Mr Lemmon’s — is often hilarious. It is pleasant to meet again such old familiars and Miss Monroe, as always, is irresistible.” – The Guardian

“Wilder’s 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Certificate
SOME LIKE IT HOT is rated 12A.

Pride on Screen: VITA & VIRIGINIA

Based on a true story, VITA & VIRGINIA details the passionate relationship between literary trailblazer Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki), and enigmatic aristocrat Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton). When their paths cross, the magnetic Vita decides the beguiling, stubborn and gifted Virginia will be her next conquest, no matter the cost. The ensuing relationship leads to the birth of Woolf’s bold, experimental novel – Orlando.

A daring celebration of an unconventional bond, and a vivid exploration of gender, sexuality, creativity and passion, VITA & VIRGINIA details the love story of two women – two writers – who smashed through social barriers to find solace in their forbidden connection.

Starring Elizabeth Debicki, Gemma Arterton, Rupert Penry-Jones, Isabella Rossellini

Awards and Reviews
Opening Night Film – BFI Flare LGBTQ Festival 2019
Toronto International Film Festival, British Film Festival Official Selection

“Vita & Virginia works as a gorgeous supplement to both women’s legacies. It’s a thoughtful celebration of their complexity and their love.” – Fishnet Cinema

Certificate
VITA & VIRGINIA is rated 12A.

Hull Independent Cinema: WE THE ANIMALS

Three boys tear through their rural New York hometown, in the midst of their young parents’ volatile love that makes and unmakes the family many times over.

While Manny and Joel grow into versions of their loving and unpredictable father (Raúl Castillo), Ma seeks to keep her youngest, Jonah, in the cocoon of home. More sensitive and conscious than his older siblings, Jonah increasingly embraces an imagined world all his own.

With a screenplay by Dan Kitrosser and Jeremiah Zagar based on the celebrated Justin Torres novel, We the Animals is a visceral coming-of-age story propelled by layered performances from its astounding cast – including three talented, young first-time actors – and stunning animated sequences which bring Jonah’s torn inner world to life.

Drawing from his documentary background, director Jeremiah Zagar creates an immersive portrait of working-class family life and brotherhood.

Starring Sheila Vand, Raúl Castillo, Evan Rosado

Awards and Reviews
Winner, NEXT Innovator Award – Sundance Film Festival
Winner, Critics Prize – Americana Film Festival
Nominee, Best Supporting Male, Best First Feature, Best Cinematography – Film Independent Spirit Awards

“For his first narrative feature, the documentarian Zagar displays a thrillingly sensitive eye for the curiosity and caution that exists in every young child’s heart, and how it is so simple for the world to crush that.” – Globe and Mail

“On one level… “We the Animals” is a classic coming-of-age tale; on another, it’s a near perfect depiction of the emotional damage that can result from economic insecurity.” – New York Times

Jeremiah Zagar | 2018 | USA | Cert 15 | 93 mins

HIC: JT LEROY

Hull Independent Cinema presents JT LEROY
Justin Kelly | 2018 | USA | Cert 15 | 108 mins

Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, this captivating true story goes beyond the headlines to tell the story of the most compelling literary ‘hoax’ of recent times. Laura Albert (Laura Dern) writes as her “avatar,” a disenfranchised young queer man named JT LeRoy. When her debut novel becomes a best-seller and JT becomes the darling of the literary world, she comes up with a unique solution to preserve her anonymity but give life to her nom-de-plume. Enter her boyfriend’s androgynous fun-loving sister Savannah Knoop (Kristen Stewart), who connects with Laura’s punk, feminist, outsider universe and agrees to be JT in the public eye. Together, they embark on a wild ride of double lives, infiltrating the Hollywood and literary elite, only to discover who they are while pretending to be someone else.

Starring Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Jim Sturgess

Awards and Reviews
Toronto International Film Festival, BFI Flare Film Festival Official Selections

“The new film smartly illuminates what’s been missing from other accounts: Why someone like Knoop would agree to, and even enjoy, taking part in someone else’s hoax.” – NPR

“A capable film featuring superbly spiky performances…” – Variety

Certificate
JT LEROY is rated 15. Visit the BBFC website for full details (may include plot spoilers).

Image credited to Signature Entertainment

Hull Independent Cinema: THUNDER ROAD

THUNDER ROAD follows Officer Arnaud on his journey to raise his young daughter as a love letter to his late Mom. Police officer Jim Arnaud does his best to keep himself together as he greets arrivals at his mother’s funeral, responsible for organising it all with both his brother and sister absent.

However, the emotion of the day results in him acting out the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’, a song which his mother would sing to him as a child, with footage of his bizarre dance going viral throughout the local community.

As well as attempting to cope with this grief, move past the embarrassment and handle the daily pressures of being a cop, Jim is also in the middle of divorce proceedings with his wife and is fighting for custody of their daughter.

Thunder Road is written, directed and also features a brilliant central performance from one-to-watch Jim Cummings.

Featuring Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson

Awards and Reviews
Winner, Grand Jury Award – SXSW
Nominee, John Cassavetes Award – Film Independent Spirit Awards
Munich Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Munich Film Festival Official Selections

“The indie film you need to see this year.” – Rolling Stone

“Melancholy, funny, excruciating and wonderfully affecting.” – Daily Mirror

Certificate
THUNDER ROAD is rated 15.

HIC: PAIN AND GLORY

Pain and Glory tells of a series of reencounters experienced by Salvador Mallo, a film director in his physical decline. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered: his childhood in the 60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia in search of prosperity, the first desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s, the pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense, writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable, the early discovery of cinema, and the void, the infinite void that creates the incapacity to keep on making films.

Pain and Glory talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need, he also finds his salvation.

Starring Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia

Awards and Reviews
Winner, Best Actor, Nominee, Palme d’Or – Cannes Film Festival
Nominee, Best Film – Sydney Film Festival

“Pain and Glory is Almodóvar’s best work for years, marvellously framed and composed, comparatively restrained for him, hugely enjoyable moment by moment.” – London Evening Standard “The hangdog expression is riven with pain, and [Banderas] plays Mallo as emotionally cauterised yet beneath it all still desperate to connect, to love and to make more films.” – The Times

Certificate
PAIN AND GLORY is rated 15. Visit the BBFC website for full details (may include plot spoilers).

Image credited to 20th Century Fox

Hull Film Festival: Hail Satan ?

HULL PREMIERE

Chronicling the extraordinary rise of one of the most colorful and controversial religious movements in American history, Hail Satan? is an inspiring and entertaining new feature documentary from acclaimed director Penny Lane (Nuts!, Our Nixon).

When media-savvy members of the Satanic Temple organize a series of public actions designed to advocate for religious freedom and challenge corrupt authority, they prove that with little more than a clever idea, a mischievous sense of humor, and a few rebellious friends, you can speak truth to power in some truly profound ways.

As charming and funny as it is thought-provoking, Hail Satan? offers a timely look at a group of often misunderstood outsiders whose unwavering commitment to social and political justice has empowered thousands of people around the world.

Hull Film Festival: Animals

YORKSHIRE PREMIERE

Would-be writer Laura and her free-spirited bestie Tyler share a messy Dublin apartment and a hearty appetite for booze, Molly and one-night stands. Yet when Laura falls for Jim, a charming but straitlaced classical pianist, Tyler worries that the party may soon be over.

Adapted by Emma Jane Unsworth from her acclaimed 2014 novel of the same name, Animals explores the long hangover between adolescence and adulthood through a bittersweet tale of two friends growing up and growing apart. Sophie Hyde, whose debut feature, 52 Tuesdays, won a best directing award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, takes a refreshingly non-judgmental look at this fraught friendship, following Laura and Tyler through their hedonistic highs and soul-searching lows. Shawkat’s live-wire performance gives Tyler an anarchic comic edge that perfectly complements Grainger’s soulful turn as the conflicted and creatively blocked Laura. The duo are supported by a stellar cast, including Dermot Murphy as a dreamy, drug-addled suitor and Amy Molloy as Grainger’s weary but loving sister.

Hull Film Festival: Non-Fiction

YORKSHIRE PREMIERE

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet reunite with acclaimed director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) for this wry, slyly seductive tale of sex, lies, and literature.

Set amidst the bohemian intelligentsia of the Parisian publishing world, NON-FICTION traces the romantic and emotional fallout that results when a controversial writer (Vincent Macaigne) begins blurring the line between fact and fiction, using his real-life love affairs—including a passionate fling with an actress (Binoche) who happens to be married to his editor (Canet)—as fodder for his explosive new novel.

Balancing dry wit with keen observations on the tensions between art, commerce, and technology, NON-FICTION is a buoyant, breezy delight from a master director at his most effortlessly brilliant.

Hull Film Festival: Aniara

YORKSHIRE PREMIERE

Based on a prescient epic poem by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s astounding and eerie ANIARA charts the fate of the human race after they have destroyed the planet.

One of several ships launched into space to start anew on Mars, ANIARA is designed to meet the needs of a species that has just consumed its birthplace: it’s a giant shopping mall. When an accident knocks the ship off course and disables its steering, the likelihood that these once-sanguine colonizers will ever reach their destination gradually begins to shrink.

A caustic portrait of humanity’s capacity for self-delusion, self-abuse, and consumption, ANIARA follows the ship’s passengers as they deal with uncertainty and dread but continue to indulge their appetites whenever and however they can.

“Swedish existential dread in outer space, with a suicidal AI, ritualistic orgies and a giant galactic shopping mall: this striking first feature is a work of daunting ambition.”

– Wendy Ide, Screen International

Hull Film Festival: Photograph

YORKSHIRE PREMIERE

Rafi works hard to stay afloat as a photographer in Mumbai. Sharing his modest accommodation with other unmarried men, he sends his money home to pay off his father’s debts and dreams of a better life.

One day he takes a picture of a young woman in front of the Gateway of India – and from this moment on he can think of nothing else. Miloni is a model student attending a school for auditors and is headed for university. Theirs are two irreconcilable worlds. When Rafi’s grandmother arrives, determined to marry off her grandson, Miloni agrees to masquerade as Rafi’s girlfriend. As the two begin to meet more and more often, Rafi shows Miloni, who has led a sheltered existence, unknown facets of their city.

Ritesh Batra, who caused a sensation with his debut film The Lunchbox, returns to his hometown Mumbai for this bittersweet romance. In atmospheric images that exude a quiet charm, he almost casually depicts how social stratification divides Indian society and creates a sensitive portrait of everyday life in this megacity caught between tradition and progress.

Hull Film Festival: Hotel Mumbai

YORKSHIRE PREMIERE

A gripping true story of humanity and heroism, vividly recounting the 2008 siege of the famed Taj Hotel by a group of terrorists in Mumbai, India.

Refusing to leave their guests, the renowned chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) and a waiter (Academy Award-Nominee Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire) choose to risk their lives to keep everyone safe. As the world watches on, a desperate couple (Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name and Nazanin Boniadi, “Homeland”) is forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to protect their newborn child.

“A chilling and valuable reminder of acts of madness, and acts of heroism, that should never be forgotten.”

– Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

The Biggest Little Farm: credit Parklnad Pictures

Hull Film Festival: The Biggest Little Farm

HULL PREMIERE

The inspiring documentary chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland outside of Los Angeles and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature.

Through dogged perseverance and embracing the opportunity provided by nature’s conflicts, the Chester’s unlock and uncover a biodiverse design for living that exists far beyond their farm, its seasons, and our wildest imagination.

Featuring breathtaking cinematography, captivating animals, and an urgent message to heed Mother Nature’s call, THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM provides us all a vital blueprint for better living and a healthier planet.

“It’s a must see that can only truly be appreciated in a theatre – don’t wait to see it at home. Surely, it’s one of the year’s best documentaries.”

– Brent Goldman, Film Inquiry