Our partnership with Rheged continues this festival with a remarkably diverse slate showing on their big screen, making it easy to base yourself here all day.
On Saturday 8th March we bring you Tarika (11am) and The Monk and the Gun (2pm).
Teenager Tarika lives with her father Ali in rural Bulgaria, but is isolated from and ostracised by the locals. She has started to develop ‘butterfly wings’, a rare spinal condition inherited from her mother and which is a source of deep superstition. When the villagers’ intolerance becomes dangerous Ali must protect his daughter, in this richly textured allegory.
After Lunana:A Yak in the Classroom won the 2023 Audience Award, we went hunting for the Director’s next effort and David found a distributor in Germany. The Monk and the Gun is again set in Bhutan, this time in 2006, and the last country to connect to the internet and television is preparing for its first election. Fearing upheavals, an ageing llama sends a young monk on a quest to acquire a pair of guns. With intriguing surprises and colourful characters, this delightfully warm and slyly satirical window onto the world’s happiest nation, builds towards a joyous finale.
On Sunday 9th March, screenings start at 11am with moving comedy The Marching Band (En Fanfare), in which an acclaimed conductor needs a bone marrow transplant. Adopted, he uncovers the existence of a younger blood brother who plays the trombone in a small marching band. A charming tearjerker whose tender moments pack a rare emotional punch.
This is followed at 2pm by Taiwanese drama Mongrel - a raw, commanding and thoughtful film about compassion and decency in the face of inequality and invisibility. We follow undocumented Thai care worker Oom, living in a remote region of Taiwan as he cares for the disabled and elderly, and is forced to navigate their mutual lack of status and currency.
At 5pm, our final Rheged film, Sister Midnight, is a comedy-drama that sees newlywed Uma trapped in domestic hell in a single-roomed Mumbai shack with her ineffectual husband - and bored out of her skull. She unearths feral impulses she never knew she had as this surreal fable takes us to places we were not expecting.
