Autumn cinema programme highlights

Encounters Film Festival 

Encounters returns this September, bringing you the best in new emerging filmmaking talent, with 142 exceptional short films in the competition line-up this year, drawn from 39 countries – from Afghanistan to Ukraine. 

The programme is headlined by the UK premiere of Paper Plane, the directorial debut of four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, alongside new films from Oscar-winner Aneil Karia (Vote Gavin Lyle), Oscar®-nominees Joshua Oppenheimer (UK Premiere of The Revolution Against Death), Bill Morrison (UK Premiere of Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon) plus Jamie Hewlett and Max Taylor’s Gorillaz film The Mountain, The Moon Cave & The Sad God.

Bristol and the South West are strongly represented, including the world premiere of Paul Holbrook’s Tor Lewa, Myles Kamwendo’s Why You Shouldn’t Date in Bristol and Rob Hifle’s RENO (European Premiere). 

Alongside the shorts are a range of special events, talks and feature film screenings, with a packed and stacked programme of industry sessions too. 

Highlights include world-renowned musician, DJ and Sirāt composer Kangding Ray performing a new immersive AV club experience at Bristol’s Prospect Building: reimagining the Sirāt score with special visuals and unseen material from Oscar-nominated director Oliver Laxe. 

There's also the English premiere of Paul Wright’s new feature film Mission, which sees the filmmaker reunite with George MacKay (For Those in Peril) for a gripping, existential drama produced by Bristol’s BAFTA-winning Early Day Films. MacKay and co-star Rosy McEwen will be joining for a Q&A too, so snap up a ticket!

Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime

Like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol emerged from the French New Wave, part of the group of critics-turned-filmmakers from the Parisian magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Chabrol’s cinema stands apart from the rest of that scene – his fascination with Alfred Hitchcock brewing a series of elegant yet poisonous bourgeois thrillers, shot with cool detachment, and laden with ironic wit and simmering violence. 

Chabrol’s legacy stretches far, with contemporary Korean filmmakers Park Chan Wook and Bong Joon Ho citing the director as a key influence on their own thrillers, and exiled Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev adapting La Femme infidèle with his new film Minotaur, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year.

‘Chabrol has his own way of creating suspense and tension that no one else can match.’ – Bong Joon Ho 

We’ll be screening the new BFI restoration of La Femme infidèle (which premiered at our own Cinema Rediscovered Festival) from Fri 11 Sep, leading into a Sunday season for October presenting four further works, including Les Biches and Le Boucher. 

BFI London Film Festival (LFF) on Tour 

This year brings the 70^th edition of LFF to our screens, for another touring line-up of previews straight from their London festival premieres in October – you can find out more by checking out our news post, but expect new features from the likes of Danny Boyle, Boots Riley, Lee Chang-dong, and a documentary from Eleanor Coppola. Our Club Shed members have an exclusive 48-hour priority booking window, so if there’s something that catches your eye, then sign up to avoid disappointment, as these previews tend to sell out pretty quick! 

Diggers, Boosters and Nine Wild Horses!

Boots Riley’s riotous anti-capitalist ride I Love Boosters is released soon after its LFF preview, playing here from Fri 30 Oct; while Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine canters onto our screens from Fri 6 Nov. McDonagh’s latest caper stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in a freewheeling satirical buddy comedy, as two bickering CIA partners holidaying on Easter Island during the 70s, shortly before the Chilean coup d’état. 

Mexican auteur and five-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu returns at the start of the month with satirical dark comedy Digger (from Fri 2 Oct), with Tom Cruise leading an impressive cast in ‘a comedy of catastrophic proportions’.

Documentary Q&As

We have a whole host of special environment-focused documentary Q&A events coming up this Autumn. From feuding farmers in the playful rewilding film Derek vs Derek, to Eleanor Mortimer’s whimsical oceanic dive to the seabeds in How Deep is Your Love. Acclaimed doc-maker Jeanie Finlay returns with All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, which follows a David-and-Goliath battle between the Teesside fishing community on the North East coast and the great industry polluters, dredging the mouth of the Tees ever deeper. Each of these events will be followed by more shows of the documentaries, so if you miss out on tickets there’ll be more opportunities to see them.

Black History Month 

This October, we’re celebrating poet, educator, activist and entrepreneur Lawrence Hoo, with a screening of his debut short film Inner City Tales (Tue 20 Oct 18:00), which screened at Watershed for the first time twenty years ago. Hoo went on to set up CARGO with Chaz Golding – changing the way that people across the world acknowledge and teach African and African Diasporic contributions to history. He’s also been a resident of Pervasive Media Studio for ten years. Sharing our many creative collaborations with Lawrence, the event will be chaired by Clare Reddington, Watershed CEO, and will celebrate the enormous contribution that Lawrence has made to art, equality and talent development in Bristol and beyond.

We’re also proud to host the premiere of First Born Second: Voices of the Children of the Windrush Era – a new documentary directed by Michelle Pascal (Fam Films) presented with co-producers Pascal and Roger Griffith MBE. Made as part of a wider multi-media project, the documentary and discussion will explore the complexities of being born in Britain while still rooted in the Caribbean – a generation experiencing the best and worst of two worlds. Tickets on sale soon. 

Halloween 

We’re bringing you a Shed-load of scares this Halloween, from the ghostly and supernatural to some haunting thrillers. We have anniversary screenings of The Others (from Mon 19 Oct) – a great haunted-house film starring an excellent Nicole Kidman – and Manhunter (from Fri 9 Oct), Michael Mann’s chilling adaption of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon novel, from the Hannibal Lecter series. 

Brace yourselves for the release of Ken Russell’s The Devils (from Fri 30 Oct) – censored for over half a century, this infamous masterpiece will finally be released on the big screen for the first time in this definitive cut, as Russell originally intended it to be seen.

“When you cut through the noise of the controversy, The Devils is a visually striking, stunningly performed and astute analysis of power and corruption. An astonishing film by one of Britain’s visionary directors which, 55 years after its original butchered release, deserves to be reappraised as the prescient masterpiece it is.” – Mark Cosgrove, Cinema Curator

Lance Oppenheim’s lurid, horror-styled Primetime explores the dark ambitions and motivations of To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen stars Robert Pattinson in the lead role, giving a towering, uncanny performance as the TV show’s host. Visually garish and grotesque, and shot in claustrophobic Academy ratio, it’s a riveting thriller with plenty of blackly comedic moments.

We’re partnering up with our friends at Noods Radio and DIY Cinema for a special 40^th anniversary show on Wed 28 Oct of The Fly – otherwise known as ’96 minutes of grotesque, vomit-soaked bedlam – and David Cronenberg’s best film’, if you ask The Guardian. We’ll be launching an open call for micro short film submissions (60 seconds and under) soon, with selected shorts to be played on the night ahead of the main feature, so get filming! Tickets on sale soon. 

Keep an eye out for a Sunday season in November marking the centenary of writer and critic John Berger, a season of puppet films in December (just in time for The Muppet Christmas Carol!), and a collection of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations – more info on those and two returning festivals – Afrika Eye and Bristol Palestine Film Festival – alongside our Christmas season in our Winter highlights article a little down the line. See you in the cinema!