The Garden Cinema Film Talk

Far out on the open sea, an expedition vessel travels toward one of the most remote regions on Earth, the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, twelve days from the nearest land. Here, darkness, silence, and immense depths conceal an unexplored universe. How Deep Is Your Love follows a group of marine biologists trying to understand life in this unknown world, while grappling with the question of whether their presence risks harming what they seek to protect. A visually hypnotic and deeply absorbing journey in which every discovery reshapes our understanding of the planet. We were joined by director Eleanor Mortimor and editor Nicole Halova who discussed the making of the film, their music choices and the open sea with host Charles Emmerson. 

The Fashion Film Club's Sarah Bailey discusses Marylin, behind the scenes anecdotes, costumes and more around classic Niagara with Andrew Wilson, author of I Wanna Be Loved By You – Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes. In one of her very best dramatic performances, Monroe is the sultry wife of Cotten’s unstable army veteran, whose presence and troubled relationship unsettles the honeymoon of another couple at Niagara Falls. Sensual, dazzling and conniving, Monroe’s femme fatale drives this thrilling noir. A famous sequence in which Monroe deploys a now iconic hip-swinging walk, demonstrates her skilful ability to use her body as an instrument to express character.  

The year is 1993. The BBC cameras haven’t arrived yet. A hundred thousand people are in a Somerset field, completely unobserved, completely themselves. Shot in Panavision CinemaScope, Glastonbury The Movie captured the real festival, not the headline acts, but the stone circle at sunrise, the rave tents, the wandering poets, The Verve at their very first festival appearance. No voiceover. No presenter. Just Glastonbury, as it was. Now digitally restored for the big screen, thirty years on.   Director Robin Mahoney shares hilarious anecdotes from behind the scenes and discusses his journey making the film with host Sam Tyler, creator of the Sonic Fields Podcast.

In partnership with The Canary UK, the Rainbow Collective screened their latest feature doc at the Garden Cinema. The filmmaking duo, also behind To Kill a War Machine, joined us after the film to discuss the film, their documentary and filmmaking background covering international stories, the aftermath of Bloody Sunday and the long fight for justice, and the legacy of the Irish independence movement today. 

Director Jack Hazan and editor David Mingay (Rude Boy) had access to David Hockney and his circle from 1970 to 1973, a critical period for the internationally-acclaimed artist following the break-up of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger. As much an intimate study of love gone wrong as a portrait of an artist at work. A Bigger Splash chronicles the emotional ripples that separation casts on their coterie. With appearances by such art scene icons (and subjects of Hockney's work) as Celia Birtwell, Ossie Clark, Henry Geldzahler and Patrick Proctor, this ground-breaking film is presented here in a newly remastered version..   Dominic Lutyens is a freelance arts writer. He is the co-author with Kirsty Hislop of the book, 70s Style & Design. He also wrote Celia Birtwell the textile designer’s biography, with her. His latest book Perriand, a monograph on architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, was published last year.  Here he is in dicusssion with Sarah Bailey, founder of the Fashion Film Club.

This screening of this multi-award winning Merchant Ivory classic is presented by the Fashion Film Club and will be followed by Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop curator Keith Lodwick.   This adaptation brings the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing, A Room With A View is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster's characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention.   The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian Sands), Lucy's life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside. (Merchant Ivory)   Curator of Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop at The Fashion and Textile Museum, London (until March 8th), Keith Lodwick is an expert on costume in Merchant Ivory films. A writer, curator and historian, Lodwick was formerly Curator of Theatre and Screen Arts at the V&A.   The Q&A will be hosted by Fashion Film Club founder Sarah Bailey.

"Power Station began in the depths of lockdown - and in the aftermath of our previous film Bank Job, where we purchased and blew up £1.2 million of local debt - with the question ‘'what could we do from where we live, with the people around us, to build power - of energy and imagination?’ Working to turn a street and local schools solar, Power Station is a scalable in-your-face prototype of community led power. Channelling Withnail and I and Ealing comedy the film charts the financial and emotional trials and tribulations of making change together.  From sleeping on rooftops to growing thousands of sunflowers and attempts at Christmas number one, community spirit and resilience are at the heart of this documentary." Co-directors Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn join us to discuss their wild journey as part of our Planting Seeds strand. You can follow the strand to get updates on new screenings.

14-year-old Zeina and her family are the last to have stayed in their besieged hometown of Damascus in Syria. A missile rips a giant hole in their home, exposing them to the outside world. When a rope is mysteriously lowered into the hole, Zeina gets her first taste of freedom, and an unimaginable world of possibility opens up for her. As the violence outside escalates, the family is pressured to evacuate, but Mutaz, her father is adamant that they stay, refusing to flee to the uncertain life of a refugee. Faced with a life or death dilemma, Zeina and Hala, her mother, must make the choice whether to stay or leave.   Sarah Agha discusses casting, magic realism, filmmaking in the Arab world, and how the film resonates a few years down the line.

Crosspollinating with our Planting Seeds strand, as we are joined by Danusia Samal from Green Rider, a movement of artists and productions shifting the TV & film industry towards a fairer and healthier way of working, and by Josh Cockcroft from Climate Spring, a global organisation dedicated to shifting our cultural response to the climate crisis by championing storytelling that transforms how it is represented in film, TV, and popular culture.

In defiance of the Paris Peace Conference Italian poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio led a rogue, short-lived, and ultranationalist occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1919. Over a century later, filmmaker Igor Bezinović revisits this strange historical episode, blending archive, reenactment and interviews with residents in the present, interrogating how a city remembers and forgets, and the enduring presence of European fascism.   A stark and peculiar lesson in the history that is not past, Fiume o morte! (Fiume or death!) won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 and is Croatia’s submission for the Oscars. Film writer Savina Petkova discusses the film with director Igor.