Join us for our revived Book to Film Club.
See excellent film adaptations of inspirational books and discuss your thoughts and opinions on both in a friendly and open discussion forum after the screening.
The series will begin with six films, screened monthly.
Our ‘Book to Film Club’ launched with a screening of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night on Thursday 29 July 2021, followed later in August by Lucrecia Martel's Zama. Screenings start at 7.30pm, and are followed by a discussion of the book and its film adaptation.
This film will be followed by regular screenings chaired and hosted by film expert Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, one of the Electric Palace’s film programmers.
You're invited to send in your suggestions for films to show as part of the club, so do contact us with your ideas.
Note: You can still come along to enjoy the films and the group without having read the books in advance!
Screenings and club events coming up
Certain Women
Thursday 16 December, 7.30pm
Kelly Reichardt, 107Mins / 2016 / USA
Starring Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone.
From her terrific debut feature, River of Grass (1994), through Wendy and Lucy (2008) and all the way to her most recent film, First Cow (2019), Kelly Reichardt has brought us incomplete, quietly suffering characters trying to feel their way into the change they may or may not attain.
It is not different in Certain Women (2016), which explores intimate lives and small everyday struggles. Adapted from the short stories ‘Native Sandstone’, ‘Travis B.’ and ‘Tome’ from the collection Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009), by Maile Meloy, the film is divided into three loosely interconnected episodes, with a focus on working women and their relationships: Laura (Laura Dern) is a lawyer wrangling a volatile client; Gina (Michelle Williams) is a successful entrepreneur struggling to find balance within her family; and Jamie, a Native American rancher (Lily Gladstone) is battling isolation and infatuation with her teacher, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart).
Reichardt’s fondness for her flawed characters, her minimalist cinematic style, and her subtle sense of humour inspire us to be generous to ourselves and others, to pay attention to trivial beautiful things, and to warmly embrace uncertain futures. It seems the perfect fit for our December Book to Film Club, the last meeting this year!
About your host, Natalia
Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha is a film researcher and programmer who specialises in Latin American cinema. Her favourite directors in this field are Ana Katz, Juliana Rojas, Luis Ospina, and especially Lucrecia Martel, "because of her sharp look at small gestures of power within intimate spaces, and the sensitive quality of her cinema," says Natalia.
Natalia moved to St Leonards in mid-2020 when the Covid pandemic slowed down for some months.
"As a film lover, when moving to a new place, one of the first things I do is take a look at the local cinema," says Natalia. And then she discovered the Electric Palace. "The cinema was closed then, but I wrote to the director Rebecca who kindly showed me the lovely venue and we had an exciting talk."
Natalia proposed to bring more films from Latin America into the Electric Palace programme. "I was thrilled by how the team welcomed my idea!"
So, now Natalia is one of our film programmers.
Although she cites Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer among her favourite filmmakers, Natalia also laughs like a drain at Superbad!
About Natalia's publications and film work
Natalia is the author of two books about Latin American cinema, and is co-editing a volume on directors including Lucrecia Martel's for Edinburgh University Press, which will be published just next year. Find out more about Natalia's publications.
She has worked with film festivals such as the BAFICI - Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, London Indian Film Festival and São Paulo International Short Film Festival, among others, and has organised several film cycles with her production company Buena Onda Produções.
Natalia holds a doctoral degree in Multimedia from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP (Brazil), and conducted postdoctoral research at the UNICAMP Institute of Language Studies, with a short period as Coimbra Group Visiting Fellow at the KU Leuven (Belgium). She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave.
We hope you enjoy meeting Natalia and learning all about the films she holds dear and the reasons why.
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