Martin Scorsese presents an impassioned and highly personal tribute to Powell and Pressburger’s work, richly illustrated with clips and rare archive material. It’s been said that had Martin Scorsese not become one of the world’s great filmmakers, he would still have been one of its greatest teachers of film history. This impassioned exploration of the films of two of his formative and most treasured inspirations follows the US filmmaker’s film essays on American and Italian cinema, delivering deeply personal reflections on what Powell and Pressburger’s work has meant to his life, alongside wonderfully illuminating analyses of the films themselves.

Producing, writing, and directing, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created some of great classics of the British golden age including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. In the words of Martin Scorsese their films were “grand, poetic, wise, adventurous, headstrong, enraptured by beauty, deeply romantic, and completely uncompromising”.

Drawing richly from the BFI National Archive, as well as private material from Scorsese and the film’s editor (and Powell’s widow) Thelma Schoonmaker, David Hinton’s film is both an ideal introduction to Powell and Pressburger’s work, and the perfect complement to our 6pm evening screening of their film, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING (1945)

Headstrong Joan Webster (the wondrous Wendy Hiller) sets off, wedding dress in tow, to marry a rich older man on his remote Hebridean island. Stranded on Mull thanks to the weather, Joan finds herself struggling to cope with the unplanned turn of events.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger weave their course of true love through flashes of surrealism, a life-threatening whirlpool and an ancient curse, disarming and enchanting in equal measure. But this is a film where small moments count the most – the passing of a cigarette between two windows or a slip on a ladder – as they build by stealth into something overwhelming. By the end we are left breathless and desperate to book the next night train and ferry to Mull.

Screening to accompany the new documentary MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER shown earlier at 3pm.

Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in Academy Award-winning mastermind George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the much-anticipated return to the iconic dystopian world he created more than 30 years ago with the seminal “Mad Max” films.  

Miller now turns the page again with an all-new original, standalone action adventure that will reveal the origins of the powerhouse character from the multiple Oscar-winning global smash “Mad Max: Fury Road.”  

As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus.  Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe.  While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

Jorge has been devoted to his job at the Cinemateca in Montevideo for 25 years, and his cosy rut is neatly documented in the first half of this concise film. He wanders through the film library, tests and repairs broken seats, introduces tardy guest filmmakers, and struggles to drum up scant business on a local radio show.

When drastic funding cuts threaten the closure of the institution, this professional crisis precipitates a charmingly mild personal revolution for Jorge. We observe him awkwardly negotiating life in the outside world with the subtle assistance of the many movie lives he’s experienced while effacing his own.

This wry, melancholic film is slyly observed by second-time director Federico Veiroj, and graced with superb black-and-white chiaroscuro and an inventive soundtrack that juxtaposes old movie music with the raucous clatter of projectors and the monastic silence of libraries and archives.

Screening as part of our year-long season - CINEMA ON SCREEN

Please note this film is being screened as part of the Woodbridge Film Society's 2023/2024 season and is therefore not open to the general public. You can read more about becoming a member here.

An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery, The Eight Mountains is a landmark cinematic experience as intimate as it is monumental, as deep as it is expansive. Adapting the award-winning novel by Paolo Cognetti, directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch (The Broken Circle Breakdown) portray through observant detail and stunning landscape photography the profound, complex relationship between Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), who first meet as children when Pietro’s Milan family vacations in an isolated village at the base of the Alpine slopes. As they mature, Pietro becomes estranged from his business-minded father (Filippo Timi) even as Bruno—emotionally abandoned by his own father—takes up the role of surrogate son. Pietro’s father’s death reunites the two in realizing his dream of constructing a cabin on the Alps, and the project and subsequent explorations of the awe-inspiring mountain range bond Pietro and Bruno in a shared purpose. Yet despite their connection, the purity of nature and the demands of society both threaten to drive the men to pursue different, possibly irrevocably divergent paths on the vertiginous terrain of life.