MARCH Monday 23rd: LA DOLCE VITA - Connaught Cinema

MARCH Monday 23rd: LA DOLCE VITA - Connaught Cinema  

Special Presentation in 4K!

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS. 
APOLOGIES AND HOPEFULLY WE WILL BE ABLE TO RESCHEDULE SOON.

March's screening is Italian director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) at The Connaught Cinema.
Date: MONDAY 23rd March 2020

Tickets: free to members/ member's one guest £5

£7.50 for adults £6.50 for seniors and students

Doors open: 8.00pm

WFC are proud to present the decadence and decay of Fellini’s ‘sexy, surreal masterpiece of modernity’ - La Dolce Vita, in this its 60th Anniversary. Aptly and ironically the title translates to The Sweet Life where Federico Fellini's groundbreaking 1960 satire put Italian cinema firmly on the world stage with its tale of hedonistic excess, delivering a new type of cinema. Pitched between his earlier neo-realist films I Vitelloni and La Strada and his later more aggressively arthouse films like 8½ and Amarcord, La Dolce Vita manages to straddle both arthouse and box office blending both into an accessible, beautiful, bold large-scale satire with grand set pieces and forceful visual metaphors. The riveting and  stylish cinematography and Fellini's bizarre, extravagant visuals have ensured the film’s longevity, influence and iconic status. Thrilling the critics and audiences outside of Italy but condemned by the Vatican, it managed to eloquently capture the bold new vision, stylistically and morally of a new decade, aptly signalling the birth of modernity.

Foregoing the tradition of neorealism the film introduced a new kind of cinema appropriate to a country that had emerged from fascism, the Second World War and post-war poverty to embrace (at least in Rome and the north) a glitzy affluence and a changed set of values that challenged Catholic morality. The neo-realist pictures were shot in the streets; but here La Dolce Vita, like Fellini’s later pictures, was made for the most part on expensive sets at Cinecittà. This use of sets cleverly heightening the sense of the artificiality of the the hollow lives on display, after all the film asks how real is any of this?

From the opening shot that shows a helicopter lifting a statue of Christ into the skies and out of Rome - where God symbolically departs - the way is paved for Fellini's extraordinarily prophetic vision of a generation's spiritual and moral decay. La Dolce Vita is at once a rebuke and a celebration of all that had come before and of all that would be to come. The depravity is gauged against the exploits of Marcello (Mastroianni), a playboy hack who seeks out sensationalist stories by bedding socialites and going to parties. Marcello - like us - is both repelled by and drawn to the lifestyles he records. Fellini targets at once both a godless society that has become a kind of hell (there are pointed references to Dante) and Religion that has that is on the precipice of playing the celebrity game itself. Coining the phrase Paparrazzi (derived from the word for mosquitos) the film predicts a world of celebrity hollowness and the industry that thrives on and drives it. 

La Dolce Vita may not have the shock value it once had but it's still a unrivalled masterpiece with Fellini’s genius for revealing dreamlike and surreal images everywhere. Big, bold and surreally beautiful, but with much food for thought, we at WFC headquarters cannot wait to screen it for you, and in pristine 4K! What an absolute treat.

Watch the trailer here

‘It is a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.’ Peter Bradshaw - The Guardian

‘But it has not lost the power to fascinate, stimulate and provoke, and it remains a work of moral force and a visual delight.’ Philip French  - The Observer

***Don't forget you can join our film club with membership still only £30 for a year of screenings! Pay cash or cheque on the night, with at least FOUR screenings at the Connaught included in your subscription PLUS use of our extensive DVD library, priority booking with any other on location or WFC screening and exclusive invite to our lavish Christmas party. You KNOW it makes sense!***

FEBRUARY: Holy Mountain - Connaught Cinema - Monday 10th

FEBRUARY: Holy Mountain - Connaught Cinema  - Monday 10th

February's screening is Chilean/French director Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973).
Date: MONDAY 10th February

Doors open: 8.15pm

Tickets: free to members / £7.50 for adults £6.50 for seniors and students

Connaught Cinema on Monday 10th February


Opening up 2020 with a cinematic  bang WFC are proud to present Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 mind bending and visually stunning The Holy Mountain. Financed by an ex-Beatle (John Lennon) and subsequently produced and stashed for decades by the band's ex-manager (Allen Klein), Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain is certainly unique cinema and experience extraordinaire. Skewering organized religion, consumerism, and both American peace-and-love hippiedom and militarism via a surreal search for spiritual enlightenment, The Holy Mountain is a rainbow-hued phantasmagoria of Dali-esque dementia.

Born in Chile in 1929 into what he called an abusive family, Jodorowsky left the familial home at 23 never to return. He read avidly, dabbled in poetry, spent two years at university only to leave and become interested in theatre, where after he left for France. In France he worked as a novelist, screenwriter, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a film and theatre director and producer, an actor, a film editor, a comics writer, a musician and composer, a philosopher, a puppeteer, a mime artist, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, a draughtsman, a painter, a sculptor, and a spiritual guru. But it is his venerated avant-garde and cult cinema, such as El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre (1989), all filled with violently surreal images coupled with a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation that he will best be known for.

The Holy Mountain is another complex, multi-part story that featured a man credited as "The Thief" and equated with Jesus Christ, a mystical alchemist played by Jodorowsky, seven powerful business people representing seven of the planets, a religious training regimen of spiritual rebirth, and a quest to the top of a holy mountain for the secret of immortality. Difficult to classify, and nearly impossible to explain to those who have yet to experience it; It is simultaneously beautiful and disgusting; at times it is pretentious and shallow, and other times fascinating and profound. It is nothing short of a masterpiece, and comes riddled, top to tail, with all manner of extraordinary and breathtaking set pieces, unfurling like a hallucinogenic daydream. The Holy Mountain is a film that truly must be seen to be believed.

And here at WFC Towers we can’t wait to screen it for you and at the fantastic Connaught too! Please don’t miss it. Watch the trailer here

 ‘Neither for the faint of heart or the linear of thinker, The Holy Mountain qualifies both as a fascinating period relic and an enduringly transfixing jaw-dropper.’   Geoff Pevere - The Toronto Star

***Don't forget you can join our film club with membership still only £30 for a year of screenings! Pay cash or cheque on the night, with at least FOUR screenings at the Connaught included in your subscription PLUS use of our extensive DVD library, priority booking with any other on location or WFC screening and exclusive invite to our lavish Christmas party. You KNOW it makes sense!***

Post Xmas Party Thanks

Worthing Film Club would just like to say a massive thank you to all our members who braved the cold, damp, dark, December night to attend our annual xmas party. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves so we trust you had a good time too. We hope you enjoyed not only the very delicious pizzas - very kindly supplied by the excellent Pizzaface Worthing - but also watching the veritable smorgasbord of short films picked by the committee members.

We would also like to thank our members for their continued support of the Club and also Independent Cinema. We will be taking you on many more cinematic adventures in 2020, so be sure to renew your membership and attend our screenings. 

Merry Xmas and A Very Happy New Year and see u all next year!

DECEMBER - CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!! - Coast Cafe, Monday 9th

DECEMBER - CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!! - Coast Cafe, Monday 9th

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Worthing Film Club will be hosting its annual Christmas Party at the lovely and cozy Coast.

Doors open: 7.30pm 
Short Film screenings from 8pm

Members only but members can bring along a guest for only £5.00!

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Worthing Film Club would like to invite its members to the annual Christmas Party.  
There will be the usual selection of short films in-between the mingling and merriment. All films have been hand selected by the Committee Members so there should be some lovely unseen surprises in there to delight everybody. 

A night of film, fun, food, drink and excellent company in great surroundings at Coast. Hopefully you will be able to join us for the xmas film festivities.

On offer will be food, especially some very delicious pizzas courtesy of the wonderful Pizzaface and nibbles and some free drinks, as well as a well stocked bar at Coast.

We really hope to see you there!

Not a member yet? No problem, you can join on the night and delight in WFC's exclusive seasonal celebrations!!! For more details on membership, see here.

Stuck on present ideas for Christmas and want something different and interesting? Why not give someone the fabulous gift of a Worthing Film Club membership! At a bargain rate of £30 until December 31st, members can enjoy a variety of screenings at a variety of venues, including the Connaught Cinema, free use of our extensive DVD library and an exclusive invite to our annual Xmas party. More information on the membership can be found on our website above. 

Contact worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to order a membership and we can post it out to you- cheques payable to Worthing Film Club. Or why not pick one up at this year's Member's Christmas Party on Monday 9th December?!

Worthing Film Club wishes to thank all their members for their continued support of the club and alternative cinema. Wishing you all a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

Here's to many more adventures in cinema in 2020!

NOVEMBER: November COAST Monday 11th

NOVEMBER: November COAST Monday 11th

NOVEMBER's screening is at Coast cafe, Worthing.
Date: MONDAY 11th November
Doors : 7.30pm
Film: 8pm
£5.00 to non-members
November (2017) Director Rainer Sarnet

November (2017) is a gorgeously shot, deeply strange, hugely atmospheric black-and-white trip through a tale of magic and malice in folkloric rural Estonia. Based on a novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirahk Estonian writer-director Rainer Sarnet, uses ancient folk tales from the region to deconstruct a love triangle that turns the familiar into something shockingly unexpected. It’s both gravely serious and a demonically funny, a blend meant to catch audiences off balance and serve up a something truly unique.

Skilfully blending the ordinary with the outlandish, magic with the mundane the director draws us into the world of Estonian folklore, where werewolves lurk, spirits roam, the plague threatens, and a young girl named Liina is ready to die in the name of love. Nothing in this village is taboo as the residents fight the odds to survive the cold winter with the aid of kratts, farmers’ helpers created out of old tools, hay, and animal bones and brought to life by the devil himself.

Inspired by the photographs Johannes Paasuke took of Estonian peasants in the 19th century Sarnet and her cinematographer Mart Taniel have forged a stunningly poetic film, both monochromatic and mesmerizing, and without sentimental crutches that usually accompany ghost stories. Everything feels freshly observed, offbeat in ways that make us see the past through eyes that are woke. Christian traditions go head to head with pagan rituals, self-gratification battles selflessness and love unrequited may be better than no love at all. 

Much of the film’s appeal lies in the utterly transfixing and hugely innovative black and white cinematography (some of it shot on infrared), that deservedly won the cinematography prize in Tribeca in 2017. A special nod too for Polish composer and musician Jacaszek, who knows how to use an electric guitar to fry your nerves, and helps to add another layer of intensity to this heady brew.

November is a folk tale too odd to begin with “once upon a time,” and far too peculiar to end with “happily ever after”, so be sure to allow yourself to come under its spell. Don’t miss this entrancing gem.

Watch the trailer here

***Estonian folk tale involving peasants, perversion and possessed animal skulls should, in a perfect world, become a new midnight-movie classic. Peter Travers - Rolling Stone***

***Few films offer the experience of being swept into a folktale. Like the tides of a strange dream, November pulls you into its beguiling world: an impoverished town in 19th-century Estonia. Emily Buder - No Film School***

Don't forget you can join our film club with membership still only £30 for a year of screenings! Get your membership before prices will rise in the new year!

Pay cash or cheque on the night, with at least FOUR screenings at the Connaught included in your subscription PLUS use of our extensive DVD library, priority booking with any other on location or WFC screening and exclusive invite to our lavish Christmas party. You KNOW it makes sense.

OCTOBER: The Chambermaid COAST Tuesday 15th

OCTOBER's screening is at Coast cafe, Worthing.
Date: TUESDAY 15th October
Doors : 7.30pm
Film: 8pm
The Chambermaid (2018) Director Lilia Aviles.

The Mexican actor-turned-director makes a terrifically assured feature debut: an eerily atmospheric, poignant, disquieting movie about 21st-century luxury and the invisible servant class required to maintain it. It is a film to put alongside Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, in that it’s about the emotional cost of submission.

Gabriela Cartol plays Eve, a twentysomething chambermaid in an upscaleMexico City hotel – a virtual city-state of five-star opulence. As she moves from room to room in her overalls and hairnet, her working day requires her to be in constant, tactile contact with the kind of sumptuousness that she could never dream of in her own life: creamy duvets on beds the size of aircraft carriers, exquisite pillows, marbled granite in the bathroom.

A quietly empathic film where Aviles cinematographer Carlos Rossini, gives Cartol the space and time to subtly own the film through beautifully tailored scenes of breath taking opulence with pathos, pain and humour. 

Don't miss this patient and poignant look into an unseen world.

Watch the trailer here


*** @heavier things (the Guardian) said: 'This is brilliantly confident filmmaking' ***

***The Chambermaid was Mark Kermode's film of the week on opening on 26th July.***

***Ian Freer (Empire) ' a low-key but confident movie that shines a light on an invisible workforce with both compassion and simmering anger.'****

Don't forget you can join our film club with membership still only £30 for a year of screenings! Get your membership before prices will rise in the new year!
Pay cash or cheque on the night, with at least FOUR screenings at the Connaught included in your subscription PLUS use of our extensive DVD library, priority booking with any other on location or WFC screening and exclusive invite to our lavish Christmas party. You KNOW it makes sense.

September - Stalker - Connaught Cinema, Tuesday 10th 

September's film from Russian director And Tarkovsky is Stalker (1979).

Doors open: 8.15pm
Tickets: free to members / £7.50 for adults £6.50 for seniors and students

Connaught Cinema on Tuesday 10th September

WFC are very proud to be screening Russian auteur and visionary Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece Stalker, on this the film’s 40th anniversary. Patrick Nabarro of pnabarro wordpress states that the film is ‘One of the most mesmeric visual and sonic scapes ever committed to celluloid, Andrei Tarkovsky’s stunning Stalker is a true existential parable – with its huge maguffin of ‘The Zone’ nothing more than a genius dramaturgical blank canvas around which Tarkovsky wraps another of his epic musings on what it means to be human.’

Even in a career as distinguished as Tarkovsky’s Stalker still remains one of the highlights. Born in the Soviet Union to a noted poet father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky studied music and Arabic before finding his true calling and enrolling in the Soviet film school V.G.I.K. He quickly distinguished himself as a rare and gifted director with his calling card film Ivan’s Childhood (1962), an audacious, poetic and visually stunning study of the mysteries of childhood. His trade mark slow, long takes (he famously described filmmaking as "sculpting in time") and the mysterious magic of imagery which is hard to match for sheer beauty and a stunning use of colour, are all correct and present in Stalker, his 5th feature film. It is a slow and meditative film, the audience is invited to contemplate more than to watch, to let go of an urge to figure out a concrete meaning, but to individually interpret. As Ingmar Bergman once famously said: “Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow?”

Stalker is a complex, oblique parable that draws unforgettable images and philosophical musings from its sci-fi/thriller setting. Sci-fi it may be but not as we are used to. Stalker has little use for the broader hallmarks of the genre: robots, spaceships, lavish totalitarian dystopias, and other stock scenarios imagined as empirical extrapolations of a given society. Here Tarkovsky forges a future vision all of his own, stuck in a hinterland of familiar yet unfamiliar landscapes which allows it to evoke the uncanny, the unknowable, and the fundamental mysteriousness of existence. Very loosely adapted from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novella “Roadside Picnic,” “Stalker” is set in an unnamed country in a vague near-future, where there is an area called the Zone. It is apparently inhabited by aliens and contains the Room, where in it is believed wishes are granted. In the Zone, nothing is what it seems. Objects change places, the landscape shifts and rearranges itself. It seems as if an unknown intelligence is actively thwarting any attempt to penetrate its borders. The Stalker is the hired guide for the Professor and the Writer who wish to enter the Zone and ultimately the Room. But as with the rearranging landscape all is not what it seems with the three characters. Geoff Dyer states ‘one of the film’s most remarkable qualities is its resistance to interpretation. Archetypal characters reveal themselves as unique individuals; established facts waver and evaporate; desperately sought goals become objects of dread. Stalker, Zone, Room—none escapes ambiguity or interrogation. We may well leave the film knowing less than we did when we entered.’

'The plot is a coat hanger on which the director hangs oblique, open-ended philosophical, psychological, and existential ruminations about the nature of art and the essence of the human soul.’ ‘Nonetheless, it remains a dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men.’  Patrick Nabarro - pnabarro wordpress In aggregate, however, what these various artifacts, objects, and narrative events do ultimately capture is something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that’s simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us. Is that thing hope? Faith? Or, as implied by the masterful climactic monologue from Stalker’s wife, is it simply devotion? Perhaps Tarkovsky summed it up best when he wrote about Stalker, “In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love."

So WFC invite you to journey with us through the Zone and ultimately to the Room guided by the Stalker. Please don’t miss this screening, it is really is Event Cinema and what a treat to be watching it at the lovely Connaught!

Don't miss out. Watch the trailer here

‘Stalker is a movie to be watched as many times as physically possible, to be picked apart, discussed, argued over, written about, to inspire music, books, poetry, other movies, teachers, philosophers, historians, governments, even the way an individual might chose to live their life. It really is that astounding.’

David Jenkins - little white lies

‘Whatever its ultimate meaning, this is a complex, challenging work of rare beauty and power whose elusiveness is part of its fascination.’ David Parkinson - Empire

‘The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world all its own.’ Mark Olsen - Los Angeles Times

The film is free to Worthing Film Club members (£30 a year - email Caroline at worthingfilmclub@gmail.com to join) or £5 for a ticket, cash on the door.  For more details on membership, see here