Birkbeck Cinema, Saturday 24th December 2018: 14:00 – 20:00
Free entrance, book your tickets here.

Family Life Film Club

Family Life Film Club has been set up as a sibling group to the long-running Fruitvale Film Club, also hosted semi-regularly at Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image on Saturday afternoons. While Fruitvale’s agenda has been (and remains) to offer a cinephile solidarity space for those affected specifically by police and state violence – we talk honestly about the films we show after we have watched them together, discussing how the issues they address may help us grapple better with similar issues in our own lives – the Family Life Film Club offers a similar space of solidarity for those affected by the largely unspoken traumas of imperfect family life. Can filmic representations of insecure attachment, disconnection, and different kinds of abandonment help viewers to make sense of the difficulties in their own family lives? Might cinema’s various resolutions and reunions (not to mention crises and conflicts) usefully intervene in the internal family (melo)dramas which so many of us silently carry around? Or might they at least offer us alternative perspectives? The Family Life Film Club welcomes anyone who is interested in exploring collective film-watching from this emotionally open perspective.

A Monster Calls (J. A. Bayona, 2016)

Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver and Felicity Jones star in this adaptation of the award-winning children’s book by Patrick Ness, about a lonely young boy struggling with the imminent death of his terminally ill mother who is befriended by a friendly, shambling monster that arrives in his room nightly to tell him stories. (TIFF)