A shadow electoral college; a voting process shrouded in secrecy and subject to clandestine and Machiavellian bargains. That’s right – we can now reveal the results of our annual staff picks poll, with the winning films resurrected on Garden Cinema screens for your viewing pleasure.
The Garden Cinema Staff Picks: New Releases
Straight out of left field, our runaway winner of the new releases poll is the idiosyncratic Radu Jude’s latest work, the formally and thematically boundary pushing Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Less surprising is our second pick, the longest running title at The Garden Cinema this year (11 weeks), Alice Rohrwacher’s magical La Chimera. And lastly, one of our programmers will be very happy that their favourite film of 2024, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s beguiling eco-parable, Evil Does Not Exist, has crept into third position.
The Garden Cinema Staff Picks: Classic Titles
Surprises abound in the classics poll too, with Nadine Labaki’s beautiful, funny, and moving Caramel placing first. Also representing last summer’s ‘Woman Aren’t Funny’ season is Cheryl Dunye’s queer classic – and act of black screen history reclamation – The Watermelon Woman. Our final selection takes us all the way back to January 2024 with Luis Buñuel’s anarchic Viridiana, which was decried as blasphemous by the Vatican, and suppressed by Franco upon its release in 1961.
So join us to mourn and celebrate the passing year in film.
