Members’ Choice – Wimbledon Film Club

Seaside Special

Funny, entertaining doc exploring British cultural identity: a Norfolk coastal resort prepares for the 2019 summer season and the UK’s last original end-of-the-pier variety show.
Blue Jean

A closeted PE teacher in 1980s Britain struggles to keep her sexuality hidden after the arrival of a new student.
Holy Spider

Zar Amir Ebrahimi won Best Actress at Cannes for her role as an investigative journalist going undercover to track down a killer.
All That Breathes

After a successful world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Festival, Shaunak Sen’s documentary on two brothers who tend injured Black Kites in New Delhi went on to pick up major awards at Cannes and the London Film Festival, and was nominated for both the Oscars and BAFTAs. Focusing on a particular ecological crisis in the…
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

Bhutanese writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s first feature film – made on an extremely small budget – weaves together images and stories that he collected as a photographer within Bhutan. Filming in the remote Himalayan village of Lunana was sun-dependent, as solar panels were used to power the crew’s camera, sound and laptop; Dorji explains that…
Aftersun

Though widely described as a coming-of-age film, Aftersun is more accurately an essay in reflection as the adult Sophie (Rowlson-Hall) looks back on a holiday at a Turkish resort in the 1990s spent with her father, Calum (Mescal). While the wider circumstances are never fully explained, it’s clear that this was a pivotal moment for…
The Banshees of Inisherin

The setting of the film is obviously meant to represent a larger canvas. Inisherin literally translates as Island of Ireland. But this may be just one of many misdirections by Martin McDonagh who gleefully toys with the tropes of Irish history. Far from being a parable about the distantly-heard Civil War, this is a more…
The Quiet Girl

The debut feature film from the Irish documentary maker Colm Bairéad has earned plaudits both in Ireland and abroard, culminating in its nomination for the 2023 Academy Awards (Best International Film category). Bairéad both wrote the screenplay, based on the 2010 English-language novella Foster by Irish writer Claire Keegan, and directed the film, and his…
Hit The Road

Debut writer/director Panah Panahi is inevitably described as ‘the son of Jafar Panahi’; he has acknowledged that fear of being compared to his famous father “completely paralysed me for years”. Jafar learned his craft working as the assistant of celebrated Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami – Panah remembers learning as a child from both filmmakers, “sitting…
The Taste of Tea

The Taste of Tea has been referred to as a psychedelic version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, but this is to undersell the humour and warmth of Katsuhito Ishii’s tale of three generations of the Haruno family. There is no oppressive religion and little angst beyond the growing pains of the children, Sachiko and…