Viva Lewes Issue #152 May 2019

ON THIS MONTH: FILM
Trashed, Saboteur and Porco Rosso
Film ’19
Dexter Lee’s cinema round-up
Let’s start this month’s Depot round-up with a
couple of great renegade-couple road movies, on
May 2nd. In the morning Jenny Stewart gives a
lecture after a screening of Arthur Penn’s ‘New
Hollywood’ classic Bonnie & Clyde, starring Warren
Beatty and Faye Dunaway; in the evening –
thanks to the Depot’s ‘Young Programmers’ – it’s
the turn of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in
Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise.
Meanwhile on the 9th, the book to film group
will be discussing which is the better version
of The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris’
bestselling 1988 novel, or Jonathan Demme’s
1991 movie, starring Anthony Hopkins as one
of the creepiest villains in film history (also
screened 4th).
At the other end of the scare-scale, in April
there was a record crowd for a Dementia-
Friendly screening, when no fewer than 97
people watched The Wizard of Oz. Let’s hope a
similar-sized crowd enjoys a sing-along (and a
wave-props-along) to Show Boat (7th).
On the same night there’s a rare screening for
the Hayao Miyazaki-directed Studio Ghibli
animation Porco Rosso, set high in the sky over
Mussolini’s Italy. This is a prelude to a symposium
on anime, run by the University of Sussex,
throughout the next day.
Dying Matters Week starts on the 13th, and
to mark it, there’s a run of last year’s powerful,
life-affirming local documentary, Dead Good,
largely about the fine work of local funeral
directors Arka, from the 10th to the 16th.
On the 15th there’s the first edition of a new
initiative, the International Supper Club, in
which a foreign film is digested along with
a meal from the same country. First up it’s
Poland, with a 2018 movie about a journalist
trying to get to the bottom of 1940’s Katyn
Massacre, The Last Witness.
Depot are gradually taking us through the
Hitchcock oeuvre, and we have reached ‘The
War Years’. On the 19th there’s the 1942
thriller Saboteur, starring Robert Cummings;
on the 21st we have Shadow of a Doubt (1943,
with Joseph Cotten), and on the 27th it’s 1944’s
Lifeboat, a collaboration between the director
and American novelist John Steinbeck.
Plastic Free Lewes have organised a screening
of the 2012 film Trashed (20th), with an appearance
by director Candida Brady, bringing
viewers up to date with the plastic waste crisis,
which has really hit the public consciousness –
and rightly so – since she made her film. (See
page 33.)
And finally, from the Depot, a couple of
short-film sessions. On the 23rd, the Depot’s
Young Programmers select films from the 2019
London Short Film Festival; on the 28th, you
can see the University of Brighton Digital
Film Festival, featuring shorts by students and
members of the public.
Which just leaves room to mention the last
movie in the Lewes Film Club season, at the All
Saints, an animation set in Afghanistan called
The Breadwinner (3rd), featuring a young girl’s
courage under Taliban rule, as she masquerades
as a boy to help save her family.
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