Keswick Film Festival
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
This year, Keswick Film Festival marks 25 years with a programme featuring some of the best of contemporary independent cinema, alongside select classics, and work from some choice Cumbrian talent. Screenings for the anniversary 2025 edition are spread across the Lakeland town, as audiences are invited to see gritty dramas, family movies, animations and short films and more at Theatre by the Lake, Rheged and the Keswick Alhanmbra.
Big movie highlights showing this March include family-friendly Latvian animation Flow, which has been earning rave reviews and awards buzz for its story of a solitary cat who must collaborate with other animals when its home is devastated by a great flood. There’s also a chance to catch the newly minted Golden Globe Best Drama Film winner The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody as a visionary architect who escapes post-war Europe for America where he puts his theories into practice. While we’re excited to see RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, which takes a radical aesthetic approach to the celebrated novel about two African American boys sent to an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida.
Keswick Film Festival aims to take audiences right across the globe and there are titles that provide a cine-trip to Iran, France, Finland, China and Palestine
Keswick Film Festival aims to take audiences right across the globe and there are titles that provide a cine-trip to Iran, France, Finland, China and Palestine. From Taiwan, Chiang Wei-liang and Yin You-qiao’s Mongrel is a drama about an undocumented Thai migrant working as a caregiver for rural families. Jacques Audiard’s multi-award winning Emilia Perez is a musical crime drama set in Mexico starring the likes of Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez. Then there’s Pawo Choyning Dorji’s new film, The Monk and the Gun a new political satire from the Kingdom of Bhutan which follows the director’s success, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.
Adding a more local flavour, The Osprey Short Film Awards features brand new shorts with a significant connection to Cumbria. Judged by audiences and a panel of judges, the awards highlight the work of talented filmmakers working in the region. Meanwhile, the festival have also lined up a showing of Ken Russel’s psychedelic 1975 musical Tommy, which in addition to the talents of The Who, also features the landscapes of Borrowdale.
Other special events for the 25th anniversary Keswick Film Festival include a screening of Chantal Akerman’s monumental Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles which was voted the Greatest Film Ever Made in the prestigious 2022 Sight & Sound critics poll. Plus, there’s a chance for audiences to get voting too, as organisers have compiled a list of the best films to have screened across the Festival and Film Club over the last quarter-century, and they want you to help decide what should show in the Alhambra’s state-of-the-art Screen 2.
