Autumn of classic cinema in Wotton-under-Edge

Read the full autumn 2024 brochure at this link

This autumn, the Electric Picture House Cinema in Wotton-under-Edge will be playing a range of classic cinema titles alongside its usual programme of new releases. During September and October, the venue will feature selected titles from the 2024 touring programme of Cinema Rediscovered, the Bristol Festival dedicated to the rediscovery and revival of great films.

Gareth Negus, Managing Director of the cinema, said, “We’ve seen very strong interest from our audience for classic titles over the past year, so we’re delighted to be exploring cinema’s heritage in greater depth than ever.”

The season begins with an iconic film from the 1980s, newly restored to mark its 40^th anniversary. Paris, Texas (12A, Sunday 8 September), an unconventional road movie made in America by German writer/director Wim Wenders, stars Harry Dean Stanton as a man searching for his ex-wife (Natassja Kinski). Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the film also gained a cult following in part for the soundtrack by Ry Cooder.

Between The Godfather Parts I and II, Francis Ford Coppola directed Gene Hackman in The Conversation (12A, Sunday 15 September). In this thriller, which now feels prophetic in its portrait of surveillance culture, Hackman plays a surveillance expert who has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that a couple he is spying on will be murdered.

A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer/director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in the mystery Lone Star (15, Sunday 22 September), his 1992 masterpiece that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. When Sam reencounters his high school flame (Elizabeth Peña), it becomes clear that secrets from the past can’t stay buried forever.

The Long Goodbye (18, Monday 30 September) sees the classic Raymond Chandler novel given a laid-back, distinctly 70s LA groove by director Robert Altman. A late-night visit from a Mexico bound friend leads dishevelled PI Philip Marlow (Elliott Gould) into trouble with both the cops and the mob.

The season concludes with the classic Chinatown (15, Sunday 15 October). Robert Towne, who died last month, wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for this study of power and corruption, born of his interest in the history of Los Angeles. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway smoulder against the backdrop of late 1930’s LA, in a narrative firmly grounded in historical reality.

Tickets can be booked on www.wottoncinema.com.

Cinema Rediscovered on Tour is a Watershed project in collaboration with Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI awarding funds from The National Lottery.

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