Before our screening of La hija de todas las rabias (Daughter of Rage) our audience enjoyed a guitar set by Nicaraguan musician Omar Rios.
Part of our New Central American season at The Garden Cinema.
Explore our upcoming seasons and book tickets.
Caramel (Nadine Labaki, 2007) is a Middle Eastern romcom that challenges binding cultural traditions whilst celebrating female friendship. Showing at The Garden Cinema as part of our Women Aren’t Funny season.
Our very own Abla Kandalaft is joined by Laila Alj, an actor and theatre producer, to discuss and contextualise the film. In their post-film discussion with a Garden Cinema audience they cover bringing humour from the Middle East to the West, and bring insight to the economic, religious and queer milieu that gives rise to the film’s interweaving storylines.
Find out more about our Women Aren’t Funny season and book tickets.
Recorded at The Garden Cinema on 7th July 2024
Buitumelo Kotekwa introduces The Watermelon Women and reads Zoe Leonard’s poem ‘I Want A President’.
Buitumelo Kotekwa is an artist, poet, and lesbian africanfuturist and their practice across mediums focuses on the unravelling and reconstruction of worlds centring the global majority and the echoes of Black peoples through time.
Find out more about our Women Aren’t Funny season and book tickets.
Recorded at The Garden Cinema on 4th July 2024
Women Aren’t Funny, is a season celebrating 13 films directed & written by women from the 1940s to today. Explore the season and book tickets: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/women-arent-funny/
The Heartbreak Kid is Elaine May’s second film as a director, a melancholic tale that turns the rom-com genre on its head. Our guests Darren Richman and Devorah Baum, and a Garden Cinema audience, break down the themes and psychology of its characters in this post-film discussion.
Devorah Baum is a co-director and the author of a number of books including On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton) and The Jewish Joke (Profile), working as an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton.
Darren Richman is a writer and journalist, having written for The Jewish News, The Guardian, Little White Lie, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent.
Recorded on 17th June 2024 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ
Women Aren’t Funny, is a season celebrating 13 films directed & written by women from the 1940s to today. Explore the season and book tickets: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/women-arent-funny/
The Passionate Stranger is a highly satirical takedown of romantic novel tropes – so formally experimental that it feels decades ahead of its time. Muriel Box is Britain’s most prolific female director but is often overlooked. Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and was the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.
Melanie Williams is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and she is currently working on a monograph on the filmmaker Muriel Box, to be published by BFI Bloomsbury.
Lawrence Napper was senior researcher on UEA’s British Cinema History Research Project from 2001-2005, and is currently a full time lecturer at King’s College London.
Recorded on 9th June 2024 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ
Women Aren’t Funny, a season celebrating 13 films directed & written by women from the 1940s to today, opened with Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance.
Explore the season and book tickets: https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/women-arent-funny/
Arzner was for some years, Hollywood’s only working female director. Our panel – a curator, a comedian and an Arzner academic – break down the history of women in Hollywood, what the film tells us about gender and sexuality in early Hollywood, and its impact today.
Melanie Iredale is a film curator, cultural activist, and director of Reclaim The Frame – a charity with a mission to champion films by filmmakers of all marginalised genders and to build audiences for them. In partnership with cinemas, distributors and festivals across the UK and beyond, #ReclaimTheFrame creates impactful and inclusive campaigns, advocating for equity in all film spaces.
Caroline Cassin is a film and cultural events programmer, who recently graduated with an MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation from the National Film and Television School. Caroline hosts monthly pre-Code cinema series, Women & Cocaine, at the Cinema Museum in London, and she curated the recent retrospective on Dorothy Arzner at the BFI. Her projects explore and re-examine women’s history in the film industry, both behind and in front of the camera.
Mary O’Connell is an award-winning silly billy, comedian and writer coming box fresh off her sold out, critically acclaimed, debut solo hour ‘Money Princess’. Named “Top 15 Must-See Comedy Shows 2023” by Rolling Stone, “Top 12 Rising Stars” by Evening Standard and called ‘one of the most relatable shows of the fringe’ by The Telegraph. She recently did a run of her hour at the Soho Theatre and has recently done tour support for Tig Notaro. Mary’s performance style is a mix of observational annoyance combined with a left-field view of the world that makes for hilarious and often absurd material. Can be seen on Comedy Central Live and BBC3’s Stand Up for Live Comedy.
Follow Mary on Instagram: https://instagram.com/marywiththegoldshoes
Recorded on 7th June 2024 at The Garden Cinema
39-41 Parker Street London WC2B 5PQ
Young people took to the streets with political muralism all over Chile in the late 60s, at the same time that young people in New York were starting modern graffiti, and May 68 took place in Paris. Chile Estyle is a documentary film which explores the past and present of Chile’s unique street art tradition, which comes from a remix of political muralism and graffiti, and has been part of Chilean cultural and political life since the 60s. The result is a visually arresting, informative, and entertaining film.
Director Pablo Aravena discusses his work and interest in street art, DJing, Hip Hop, and graffiti, and how the scene ties in with regional politics, with Alborada’s Pablo Navarrete.
The film is showing again, with a Q&A, on 13 July.
Sundance-winning Lithuanian writer-director Marija Kavtaradze joins a Garden Cinema audience to talk about her film Slow, hosted by Conic Films’s Aisha Marong. A modern love story about two people exploring how to build their own kind of intimacy, Slow was Lithuania’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards®.
Filmed at the Garden Cinema on 23rd May 2024