Thursday 12th February 7:30 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Dean Spanley

Peter O'Toole's late renaissance continues as his character Fisk becomes the emotional centre of this quixotic adaptation of a 1936 novella. Sam Neill plays the eponymous Spanley,a believer in reincarnation whose tales bring renewed life to the bereaved and melancholy Fisk.

Friday 13th February 1:00 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Satanic Angels

'A heavy-metal band is arrested for "shaking the foundations of Islam" in "The Satanic Angels," an accomplished, at times gripping critique of contempo Morocco that refreshingly adds another dimension to the usual cinematic treatments of the country. Basing his script on a real case, sophomore helmer Ahmed Boulane fearlessly places blame at nearly all levels of society, using the sheer absurdity of the charges to highlight the increasing grip of fundamentalism on an ostensibly secular state. Despite occasional sound problems, pic -- a major hit at home -- is eminently exportable. 'Variety

Friday 13th February 1:30 PM - The Alhambra

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

Buda as sharm foru rikht

From a family of film-makers, this is the teenage director's first fictional feature. Six-year-old Bakhtay is living in an Afghan cave near where the Taliban blew up statues of Buddhas in 2001. She resolves to go to school even though she has no pens, money, resources. Eventually, in her quest, she is set upon by bullying boys who act out the roles of both Taliban and Americans. Sometimes didactic and occasionally confusing, this heartfelt portrait has nevertheless garnered many awards including Crystal Bear (voted for by young people) at Berlin 2008.

Friday 13th February 1:30 PM - Studio

Pied Piper of Hützovina

The director fell for charismatic Eugene Hütz, gypsy punk leader of the New York band Gogol Bordello. He didn't reciprocate, but he did let her film him going back to his native Ukraine. Their relationship flickers in and out of visits to gypsy camps, to his bewildered family, to guardians of traditional music who dislike Hütz's take on Roma music, finally to the gypsy grandmother in a rundown Kiev apartment who inspired him.

Friday 13th February 4:00 PM - Studio

Orquesta Tipica

The tango was out of fashion in Argentina, once its natural home. Indeed, director Entel didn't particularly like the genre until he heard a band playing in the street: Orquesta Tipica Fernandez Fierro, 'a scraggly outfit of pierced, dreadlocked players who wield their accordions and violins with punk abandon.' We follow the band on a European tour, living cheaply but cheerfully, sustaining their political activism as well as their music, in this word-of-mouth popular movie.

Friday 13th February 5:00 PM - The Alhambra

Wendy And Lucy

A woman's life is derailed en route to a potentially lucrative summer job. When her car breaks down, and her dog is taken to the pound, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, and she is led through a series of increasingly dire economic decisions.

Friday 13th February 6:00 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Of Time And The City

The much-praised film-maker returns with a characteristic collage of music, archive image and personal voice-over to reflect on the Liverpool of his youth, the 50's and 60's. Both an outward and a personal history, Davies' film is iconoclastic; as he surveys changes in his native city he even finds a moment to excoriate the Beatles. A few have found cliché and pomposity here. But most have been entranced, like the five-star reviewers for both Guardian and Independent.

Friday 13th February 8:00 PM - The Alhambra

The Fall

Tarsem makes music videos and ads for a living. Between takes for those, and with millions of his own money, he made this dark fairy tale. In 1915 a paralysed stuntman meets a sickly 9-year-old Romanian girl in LA. His words, spinning a yarn at first embellishing his own plight, take wild flight when we see them enacted in the child's imagination. It's a cinematic spectacular, told at a relaxed narrative pace.

Friday 13th February 8:15 PM - Studio

The Day After Peace

A follow-up to Peace One Day, this is the campaigning story of Jeremy Gilley's ten-year quest to have September 21st recognized as International Peace Day. The United Nations have officially adopted it: but what difference does that make on the ground? We follow Gilley to Afghanistan with actor Jude Law – who says this is the most important thing he's ever done – to try and have a million and a half children vaccinated against polio on Peace Day 2007.

Friday 13th February 8:15 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Heavy Load

Heavy Load are latter-day punk: Lewes's answer to the Ramones. Most of them are also people with learning difficulties. Rothwell's funny, affectionate but frank film follows them as they try to move from benefit gigs into the mainstream. Will they ever finish the album? Will they survive schisms? Will they succeed in their campaign for the disabled to be allowed to stay out late?

Ticket also gives entry to the concert at 10pm at the Rugby Club

Saturday 14th February 12:00 PM - The Alhambra

Millions

Two boys discover a fortune. What are they to do with it? Nine-year-old Anthony is for investing and schmoozing; seven-year-old Damian is for making lives better. Damian is a child-expert on the saints, who are surprisingly practical when he discusses things with them. Why, St Claire even smokes roll-ups (it's allowed, in heaven). Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce conjure up a child's-eye-view of something resembling Shallow Grave that avoids sentimentality while seeing the best in people.

Saturday 14th February 12:30 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Trilogy

Children / Madonna and Child / Death and Transfiguration

These three early films, subsequently assembled as a single work, tell of the melancholy life and death of the director’s alter ego, Robert Tucker, growing up an artist and a homosexual in postwar working-class Liverpool. Bold use of music and an acute visual sense prefigure Davies’s later works, with sustained passages of brilliance.

Saturday 14th February 1:00 PM - Studio

Sari Soldiers

Nepal has been transformed in less than a decade from a royal kingdom to a democracy where Maoists are in the majority. Over three years Bridgham follows the lives of six women through these changes, from soldier to grieving mother, from monarchist to activist.

Thanks to the Directors

Saturday 14th February 3:00 PM - The Alhambra

Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Toki o kakeru shôjo

This story is a national treasure in Japan, adapted here as a crisp clean animation. Makoko, a high-school student, discovers through a near-death experience that she can travel back through time. So she passes the quiz she once failed, guzzles the food she once missed. But soon her adventures become more serious as she sees tragedy coming that she might prevent.

Saturday 14th February 3:00 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Young@Heart

This award-winning documentary follows a choir of older people in Northampton Mass. through a tough schedule.. And it’s not just tough because the songs are unfamiliar to the singers, featuring the best of the Clash and the Ramones. Some of them need oxygen just to get through a rehearsal; one or two are terminally ill. But they still manage the 71 rhythmic repetitions of ‘can’ in the Pointer Sisters’ Yes we can can.

Saturday 14th February 5:30 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Distant Voices, Still Lives

‘Pete Postlethwaite is the autocratic, hypnotic patriarch of a post-war Liverpool working-class family. The rest of the family struggle in his shadow. Extraordinarily, they can only express themselves through songs, persistent seams of feeling through the beautifully-realised bleakness. ‘Long, stately shots combine with impassioned performances to create a visual tour de force unmatched elsewhere in British cinema…this film is a masterpiece.’ (Andrew Pulver, The Guardian)

Saturday 14th February 5:30 PM - The Alhambra

Religulous

Borat-director Charles this time follows Bill Maher, the irreverent American chat-show host, as he interviews believers around the world. The anti-religious editing and invective may be skewed, but the outcome is very funny, from chatting to ‘Jesus’ at the Florida Holy Land Experience to sharing unexpected laughs with a couple of Vatican priests who don’t think much of the Old Testament.

Thanks to Momentum Films

Saturday 14th February 6:00 PM - Studio

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts

Scott Hicks was converted to the music of Philip Glass by his children. Now he has compiled a sumptuous and musically rich portrait of the man himself, seen from twelve different angles. Glass is a workaholic with a very particular aesthetic; only late moments from his wife Holly suggest there’s an emotional price to pay.

Saturday 14th February 7:15 PM - The Alhambra

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil

Please note the new time for this film Saturday 14th February 7:15 PM at The Alhambra

‘Lips’ Kudlow and his best friend Robb Reiner were almost metal rock stars in 1984. Here Gervasi, a roadie back then, follows the band as they mount another determined but maybe doomed effort at fame and fortune although now in their 50’s, with families to (be) support(ed by).

Saturday 14th February 8:15 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Hilary And Jackie

Jacqueline du Prė was the leading cellist of her generation. But at the height of her fame, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Still controversial because it was based on the one-sided biography by du Prė's siblings, Frank Cottrell Boyce's script provided the basis for a scintillating performance by Emily Watson in the central role.

Saturday 14th February 8:30 PM - Studio

Eraserhead

Jack Nance plays a man who initially orbits the earth, until out of his mouth is born a mutant child, and later, in the suburbs with his reluctant partner, over a meal of man-made chicken that wriggles as they eat…Yes, this is the first feature in the oeuvre of David Lynch: surrealist, exasperating, dazzling, thought-provoking, unsettling, about creativity and the fear of babies and the human imagination and maybe the director’s ego - like the work of no-one else.

Saturday 14th February 9:00 PM - The Alhambra

Four Minutes

Vier Minuten

A multiple-award winner in Germany, the title of Four Minutes refers to the musical and emotional climax of a claustrophobic prison-set relationship drama between a buttoned-up music teacher and her violent but talented pupil (played by 'a mesmerizing Hannah Herzsprung' (Jeanette Catsoulis, New York Times)). A seam of dark humour runs through this intense psychodrama, where the present gradually reveals the dark passions of the past.

Sunday 15th February 10:30 AM - The Alhambra

Autumn Ball

Sügisball

This multiple-award winner on the festival circuit is adapted from a Soviet era novel. It centres on six people in Lasnamäe, a housing estate in the Estonian capital Tallinn. Their solitude is reflected in the ways their stories touch tangentially but never quite meet. With a brooding score and fine cinematography, the movie has put Estonian film on the world map.

Sunday 15th February 12:30 PM - Studio

Grow Your Own

What happens when asylum seekers move into an allotment in the north of England. Community and racism are explored in a lightly political comedy that began life as a documentary about a real-life project. 'Raking over this original idea, screenwriters Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Carl Hunter sow the seeds of a fictional slice of life, nurturing shoots of observational comedy, gentle romance and conflict.' (Manchester Evening News)

Sunday 15th February 1:00 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Lemon Tree

Etz Limon

Hiam Abbass, in a terrific performance, plays Salma the Palestinian widow, who tends a lemon grove handed down through generations. But the Israeli Defence Minister moves in opposite and the lemon grove becomes regarded as a security threat. The based-on-a-true-story drama moves to the Israeli court, and to the hearts and minds of the central characters – including the Defence Minister’s wife Mira, who sympathises with Salma, and the young lawyer who takes on Salma’s case and soon falls for her.

Sunday 15th February 1:00 PM - The Alhambra

Patti Smith Dream of Life

Some people said this movie would only be finished when the director or its subject died. But here it finally is, and they’re both still alive: at the centre, the quirky poet, musician, artist and family woman Patti Smith. Twelve years in the making, Sebring’s film eschews most conventional biographical detail for a portrait instead through seemingly casual scenes of Smith in middle age, widowed, with children growing, returning to music and activism, contrasted with the young Patti Smith who was punk before punk had been invented.

Sunday 15th February 3:15 PM - Studio

Ramchand Pakistani

Based on a real-life case, this is the drama of a 7-year-old Pakistani boy who wanders across the border with India and ends up, along with his father who comes to look for him, languishing in jail for months, the pair mistakenly regarded as spies. Nandita Das is excellent as the bereft mother, though she is acted off the park by her screen-'son'.

Sunday 15th February 3:30 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Butterfly Kiss

When punky weirdo Eunice wanders into a service-station in search of a friend, the dowdy girl at the counter, Miriam, is so drawn to the belligerent vagrant that she takes her home. That night, to Miriam's bemusement, Eunice strips off to reveal a bruised, chained, pierced body and seduces her; the next morning, however, finding her guest gone, Miriam feels impelled to head off in pursuit, a move that will draw her into Eunice's brutal world of seedy sexual encounters and habitual murder. This bleak, provocative debut is at once emphatically English and clearly indebted to American crime and road movies. (Time Out)

Sunday 15th February 3:30 PM - The Alhambra

Call It What You Want

Call it what you want follows Kendal climber, George Ullrich, as he tests himself over a year, at home in the UK and further afield. We see him climb Lake District testpieces, skip the bolts on The Bachar-Yerian, nail Californian first ascents and solo above the ocean in Mallorca. As problematic situations arise, the film asks other notable climbers how they deal with the issues and ideas that drive the sport. Call it what you want asks the question, "what is truly important in rock climbing?"

Free Screening

Sunday 15th February 5:30 PM - Studio

Kautokino Rebellion

Kautokeino-opprøret

It’s the mid 19th century. The men of the indigenous Sami people of northern Norway are succumbing to the lure of alcohol. But strong-willed Elen leads a boycott of the local liquor store, and persuades her fellows to listen to charismatic preacher Laestadius: soon a confrontation is imminent. This story of rebellion is personal to Gaup, whose ancestors were involved: it’s been ten years in the making.

Sunday 15th February 6:00 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Blindsight

Six blind Tibetan teenagers, cast out by their own families, are in the safe refuge of blind educator Sabriya Tenberken’s school. She calls in Erik Weihenmayer, the only blind man to have climbed Everest, to help the teenagers meet a new challenge: an ascent of the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri. But what is the climb for? For whose benefit? According to whose values?

Sunday 15th February 6:00 PM - The Alhambra

Summer

Robert Carlyle, in what some say is his best performance since Trainspotting, stars as Shaun, caring for his dying alcoholic friend. Through three time-scales – childhood, adolescent and the present in their 30’s – we see the roots both of their friendship and of the fissures that have brought them to this.

Sunday 15th February 8:30 PM - The Alhambra

Traitor

From a story by Steve Martin, this thriller centres on a Muslim American action-hero – and dares to be ambiguous and complex as his treason unravels. Don Cheadle is subtle as the man scarred by a bombing of his family in the past; Guy Pearce is his mirror-image as the agent who pursues him.

Thanks to Momentum Pictures

Sunday 15th February 8:30 PM - Theatre By The Lake

Two Lovers

Is this Joaquin Phoenix's last movie? He says so. He's the downbeat man torn between the daughter of a family friend (Vinessa Shaw) and the beautiful woman along the hall (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a part written with her in mind). Premiered at Cannes, the film reunites Phoenix with the director of We own the night. And yes, that's Isabella Rossellini playing his mother.

Accelerate

Our very own short film made for us by Northern Soul Productions starring local people from the Keswick Theatre Club and University of Carlisle drama students. As Carl Hunter told us 'Frank (Cottrell Boyce) and I were having a pint one evening and we thought - wouldn't it be nice to make a short film as a 10th birthday gift to the Keswick Film Festival, so Frank wrote the script.' Carl has described the style of the film as 'La Jette meets Alan Bennet'. Filmed in and around Keswick, part funded by Cumbria Tourism who will be able to use it for advertisng the Lake District, the producers hope it will go on to win prizes at other Film Festivals.

Accelerate will be shown before Dean Spanley, Hilary and Jackie and Grow Your Own. It will also be shown at a free screening at the Alhambra on Sunday at 15.30 with a local hour-long film Call It What You Want