Lee Kang-sheng joins Victor Fan and the Screen 1 audience for a Q&A after a screening of Days, as part of Taiwanese Cinema: Now and Then at The Garden Cinema.

Among the most cathartic entries in Tsai’s filmography, Days is a work of longing, constructed with the director’s customary visual rigour and shot through with profound empathy.

Recorded on 9th September 2024 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ

Throughout Autumn, our spotlight shines on an icon of New Hollywood and beyond, the living legend that is Al Pacino. Guided by suggestions from Garden Cinema members, we’ve selected 18 titles that we believe encapsulate Pacino’s intensity, range, and charisma.

See the full list and book tickets: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/celebrating-al-pacino/

The screenings unfold broadly chronologically, commencing with the 1970s classics that showcase Pacino’s method acting style, and that played a crucial role in revitalising a flagging American film industry. The latter half of the season follows Pacino’s late 1980s hiatus from cinema. This mid-career work sees a mature Pacino exploring facets of powerful masculinity across a moral spectrum. Featuring enduring favourites, some lesser screened titles, and a few purely enjoyable treats, this is a cinematic offer that you would be wise not to refuse.

The Garden Cinema’s Zhang Yimou Retrospective ran through Summer 2024 and screened a rare selection of masterpieces from his early career. Audiences also got to watch this personal message that Zhang Yimou made exclusively for The Garden Cinema.

Find out more about the season: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/zhang-yimou-a-retrospective/

In celebration of the 75th anniversary of The Third Man (1949), Natalie Lurie performs pieces from her favourite films from the 1940s-60s for our audience in Screen 1 at The Garden Cinema.

00:00 // Intro
00:20 // La Vie en Rose
03:35 // Moon River
06:00 // Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 (Harpo Marx version)
10:22// The Third Man Theme

Natalie Lurie is a classically-trained harpist, composer, arranger and session harpist based in London, UK, and most had a song featured on the season finale of Netflix’s Grace and Frankie.
https://www.natalielurie.com / @harpbreaker

Recorded on 8th September 2023 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ

In the Works is our regular series of screenings and informal conversations with guests from all areas of the industry, hosted by Oscar nominated composer Gary Yershon. Gary’s guest is the Academy Award winning sound editor, Nina Hartstone. Aside from Moonage Daydream, for which she won an Emmy, Nina’s credits include Everest, Saltburn, and her Oscar-winning work on Bohemian Rhapsody.

Visit us at The Garden Cinema for more In The Works with Gary Yershon:
https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/partner/in-the-works/

Recorded on 1st September 2024 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ

Thu 05 Sep — Thu 03 Oct 2024 – Book tickets here.

Following our popular New Taiwanese Cinema season in Autumn 2023, we are delighted to launch a new strand, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan, to showcase the best of classic and contemporary filmmaking from the region. Join us throughout September for a celebration of two legendary director-actor collaborations, a martial arts classic, and some incredible recent debut feature films.

The iconic actor and filmmaker Lee Kang-sheng will be at the cinema in person for two Q&As exploring his career-long creative partnership with director Tsai Ming-liang. Lee will be discussing their most recent narrative feature Days (2020), as well as their 1997 masterpiece, The River. Additionally, King’s College London will welcome Lee for a free masterclass session examining his unique approach to filmmaking and performance on 10 September. Meanwhile, director Tsai himself will join us via Zoom for a post-screening Q&A for Where, the 2022 entry into his ongoing artist moving image series, ‘The Walker’.

Our spotlight also highlights the great Hou Hsiao-hsien, and his 21st Century collaborations with the luminous actress Shu Qi. The recent restoration of Millennium Mambo (2001) screens alongside the triptych love story Three Times (2005), as well as Hou’s last film, the beautiful wuxia, The Assassin (2015).

King Hu’s masterly A Touch of Zen (1970) represents the classic era of kung-fu cinema within the season. A sweeping epic of stunning mountains and forests, graceful fight choreography, and Buddhist inflections, A Touch of Zen‘s enduring legacy inspires martial arts filmmakers to this day. We approach the present with some of the best work created by Taiwanese directors in recent years. Huang Hsin-yao’s extremely funny satire The Great Buddha+ (2017) is now rightly considered a modern classic, and plays in a double bill with Huang’s ‘prelude’ short film, The Great Buddha (2014). Huang will also discuss the films in an online Q&A following the initial screening on 28 September. This exposé of the cynical exploitation of religion resonates strongly with Elvis Lu’s study of his own family’s reliance on divine guidance and rituals, in his documentary, A Holy Family (2022). Fiona Roan’s moving coming-of-age story American Girl (2021) depicts Taiwan through the eyes of a US teenager returning to her ancestral home, and is juxtaposed with another recent diasporic tale: the Sundance prize-winning Dìdi (2024). Sean Wang’s autobiographic debut recreates his experience as a second generation Asian-American, and received critical acclaim upon its recent release.

This film was selected for our programme and introduced by Anupma Shanker. Anupma is a British-Indian film curator and archives researcher, with a deep and evolving interest in colonial & post-colonial screen narratives.

A silent spectacle featuring an all-Indian cast of thousands, lavish costumes and gorgeous settings, Shiraz: A Romance of India is based on the true story -or a romanticized version- of the 17th-century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan and the events leading to the construction of the world’s most beautiful monument to love, the Taj Mahal, in memory of his dead queen, Mumtaz Mahal.