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Victim
While a few recent films had touched on the issue obliquely or through a historical setting (e.g. The Trials of Oscar Wilde), Victim stood out as a contemporary drama focusing unambiguously and sympathetically on homosexuality. Star Dirk Bogarde recalled in his biography “countless letters of gratitude flooding in” from gay men after the film’s release.…
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The Conversation
The story of a surveillance expert facing a moral dilemma, The Conversation is considered the finest of the four great paranoia thrillers of the 1970s alongside All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. Ironically, it came to be seen as a lesser Coppola work, being overshadowed by The Godfather…
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Chevalier
In contrast with images now so often associated with Greece, Chevalier is a comedy set on a boat. A group of six men that have gone on a fishing tour are entering a competition of “The best man in general”. Any skill or physical endowment that can possibly be judged is put down in their…
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Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive was nominated for Palme d’Or but won the Soundtrack Award. The film is full of music from different centuries, much of it performed by Jarmusch’s own band, SQÜRL. It spans from Paganini to Wanda Jackson and the Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan. Equally, the sources of the music also vary…
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The New Man
In this creative documentary (funded by the Wellcome Trust) director Josh Appignanesi and his partner, academic and author Dr Devorah Baum, turn the camera on themselves. The film charts from both the female and male point of view the impact of IVF treatment, pregnancy and new parenthood on their lives. Josh came to the WFC…
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The Rocket
This Australian underdog drama about a young boy thought to bring bad luck to his family is set in the little-filmed country of Laos (one of the world’s few remaining communist states and one of the poorest countries in East Asia), and spoken in the Lao language. While some of the film was filmed in…
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The Olive Tree
Alma is very close to her grandfather although he has retreated into dementia. The family has sold of his beloved thousand-year-old olive tree, to pay his debt, but the loss of the tree has brought the grandfather into a depression. When her grandfather refuses to eat, Alma sets out to find the tree for him.…
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Our Little Sister
Just as in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son (Palme d’Or in Cannes 2013), this is a family drama, but now with a focus on the relationships between sisters. Three of them are living with their grandmother as they have long been estranged from their parents. Their father left them to live with another woman.…
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Elle
Based on Betty Blue author Philippe Dijan’s novel Oh, this controversial revenge melodrama is the first film in 10 years from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Total Recall, Robocop). Now in his late 70s, he retains his trademark blackly-comic, provocative approach to serious issues, in this case the effects of an attack…
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Gueros
This feisty Mexican comedy-drama, filmed in black and white on a micro-budget, is the debut feature from director Alonso Ruizpalacios. Mexican movie star Gael Garcia Bernal (who played Che Guevara in one of the WFC’s earliest features, Motorcycle Diaries) is associate producer. Ruizpalacios was born in 1978 and studied stage directing in Mexico City before…
wimbledon film club
Season: 2016-17
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