Summer Cinema at the Shed

Our Cinema programme team Mark Cosgrove and Steph Read share some of the highlights we’ll be welcoming to Watershed’s cinema screens throughout Summer.

Stay cool in our cinemas this summer! Dive into the past, present and future of cinema and look out for opportunities to connect with some of the talent behind the films and join in the conversation. 

It’s also a good time to consider joining Club Shed, a Watershed membership that will give you discounted cinema and Undershed tickets, advance booking for special events such as this October’s London Film Festival on Tour, plus discounts in the Café & Bar.

July

Cinema Rediscovered

We kick off with the 9th edition of Cinema Rediscovered (Wed 23 - Sun 27 July) – the UK’s leading festival of newly restored, rarely screened or recently re-found cinematic gems, with over 80 screenings and events for you to fill your filmic boots.

The festival opens with a keynote address from BAFTA-winning and Oscar®-nominated producer Stephen Woolley who, along with director Julien Temple, will also introduce their ambitiously maverick musical Absolute Beginners (1986). This will usher in Against The Grain: 1980s British Cinema, a showcase of 1980s independent British films including a 40th anniversary restoration of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) with special guests Sir Stephen Frears, Gordon Warnecke plus writer Hanif Kureishi joining in remotely. 

The festival features 21 UK premieres of newly restored films, among them, Miloš Forman’s Oscars®-laden Amadeus (1984), “Cinéma du look” sensation Diva (1981) from Jean-Jacques Beineix (Betty Blue), Yasuzō Masumura’s erotically charged melodrama The Wife of Seisaku (1965), starring his long-time collaborator Ayako Wakao, and Charles Burnett’s tender, witty and influential debut Killer of Sheep (1978). Plus a whole host of rediscoveries such as The Swimmer (1968), a surreal odyssey through the suburbs starring Burt Lancaster, adapted by husband-wife duo Frank and Eleanor Perry. 

Festival passes are still available, and you can get 20% off the regular ticket price when you book 4-10 festival screenings and/or events. Plus enjoy 20% off any 6 O'Clock Gin & Tonic (including Watershed’s very own) at any time, and access to Spritz time - any drink from our Spritz menu for the reduced price of £8 between 17:00 - 20:00 at the Café & Bar and Undershed Bar throughout the Festival. 

To get you in the mood, the weekend before we’ll be bringing back a now restored favourite, Leslie Harris’ under-sung cult gem Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) which was originally screened at the 3rd edition of Cinema Rediscovered from the director’s personal 35mm copy. Since then, Leslie’s copy has been the source of a 4K restoration which will preserve this key African American title for future generations. Part cinéma vérité, part hip-hop music video, this is a groundbreaking, streetwise look at inner city black life that should have been a teen classic in the vein of Clueless or She's All That.

Our regular Sunday season slot for July is Transnational Japan in Hollywood which emerged out of last year’s Cinema Rediscovered initiative, Pitch to Park Circus. Freelance curator Yuriko Hamaguchi’s winning season pitch explores representations of Japan as "Other”, by revisiting a selection of Hollywood films that depict Japanese-ness through an external lens. Ranging from Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) to Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), with the final film, House of Bamboo (1955) directed by the explosively uncompromising Sam Fuller, playing as part of this year’s festival on the final Sunday of the month. 

Playing on the final day of Cinema Rediscovered and kicking off our Sunday season for August we have Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000), the first of this controversial Austrian director’s films to be made in France. Complicit: A Michael Haneke Season on 35mm runs throughout the month, taking in key works of social critique from the provocative auteur, including his original version of Funny Games (1997) and later Palme d’Or winners The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), all presented on analogue film. 

August

We’re collaborating with curator – and former UWE MA Curating placement – Dáire Carson from The Little Film Society to invite families to spend their Summer in the Stars with us over Saturdays in August. We'll be playing a selection of classics and rediscovered gems that launch audiences into space – from George Méliès A Trip to the Moon to Japanese anime Night on the Galactic Railroad. 

The director of My Life as a Courgette (2016), Claude Barras returns with a galvanising and heartfelt stop-motion tale Savages, which features a young Indigenous duo fighting to protect the forest of Borneo. This ecological adventure premiered at Cannes to great acclaim, and plays here from Fri 1 Aug.

Releasing over a period of weeks throughout the summer is Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy about intimacy – Sex and Love played at last year’s Berlinale and Venice film festivals respectively, while this year’s Berlinale marked the premiere of the trilogy’s final film – Dreams. A piercing study of first love and awkward infatuation, the film focuses on a teenager writing about her crush on a teacher in what develops into a sensitive, queer coming-of-age story. 

As if one trilogy weren’t enough, we have another trio of films exploring a relationship this summer – we’re marking the 30th anniversary of Richard Linklater’s brief encounter romance Before Sunrise (1995) with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy by screening the whole The Before Trilogy each film playing over a week in August. 

New releases Young Hearts and Little Trouble Girls continue the queer coming-of-age theme, alongside Haugerud’s previously mentioned Dreams. Young Hearts is a tender, playful Belgian debut, about 14-year old Elias who falls in love with the boy next door. With the ages of the two leads and the sweeping cycling scenes set in the rural countryside, it’s very reminiscent of Lukas Dhont’s film Close, but without the slightly traumatic ending!

Whilst Little Trouble Girls, Slovenian filmmaker Urška Djukić’s striking debut feature follows a shy, slightly naive 16-year-old on a girls’ choir trip as she explores her emerging feelings of yearning, including for her new friend, whilst a hovering sense of Catholic guilt lingers over everything. The film’s delicacy and this sense of teetering on the edge of adolescence have earned her comparisons to the early works of French director Céline Sciamma (Water Lillies, Tomboy).

Tackling slightly thornier and more adult themes are Together and Sorry, Baby – both reimagine modern romance through radically different lenses. Together is a surreal body-horror love story about obsessive connection and co-dependency, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, whilst Sorry, Baby offers a tender, darkly funny exploration of healing, consent and emotional intimacy in the wake of trauma; an impressive directorial debut from Eva Victor, who also stars. 

Our collaboration with Bristol Doc Club continues with Motherboard, a feature documentary from BAFTA-winning shorts director Victoria Mapplebeck. Featuring footage filmed over a twenty-year period, BAFTA-winning shorts director Victoria Mapplebeck’s home video diaries chart the experience of raising her son Jim as a single parent, offering an unusually frank and unsentimental look at motherhood.

Following its star-studded premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, we bring you Eddington, Ari Aster’s bold, critically divisive genre-bending thriller that plunges into the chaos of a small New Mexico town at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as a rebellious sheriff who challenges the town’s mask wearing mandate and runs against the mayor (Pedro Pascal), it is a wild, unsettling ride through the fractured American psyche, as timely as it is terrifying.

“Eddington was one of the talking points of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Like the daily news coming out of America it was an unsettling experience but the debate around the film focussed on the question of whether Aster’s film was satirising or celebrating? Only you can decide. One thing I do know is that the New Mexico landscape is captured with sublime otherworldly beauty by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji.”  Mark Cosgrove, Cinema Curator

Looking ahead to September

The autumn festival season kicks off in September, starting with Fashion in Film Festival, taking place here between Fri 5 – Sun 7 Sept. In response to the ongoing climate and ecological crisis, their latest edition – ‘Grounded’ – takes cinema as a lens through which to consider the entanglements between fashion, the human body and nature.

We are thrilled to see the return of the Encounters Film Festival this September (24th-28th) for its 30th anniversary celebration, bringing together three decades of cinematic discovery in one extraordinary week. This year's edition will showcase hundreds of new short films from around the world, a feature film programme highlighting festival alumni and South West filmmakers, a retrospective celebrating the festival's remarkable legacy plus headline events merging film, music and performance at Bristol Beacon and a whole host of industry talks and events. From emerging storytellers to established voices, family programming to genre thrills, Encounters is the UK's essential destination for discovering the future of cinema and a great place to make connections, whether you’re a filmmaker or film lover. Passes are available now at 2025.encounters.film.

And look out for the always tantalising line up of previews in the London Film Festival on Tour in October.

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