FREE FILMS at the Grassmarket Community Cinema

Fantastic free screenings of films – every week and in the school holidays !

This first programme of 2019 is packed full of filmic goodies that we simply have to share with you. There are two themes that we have threaded through the programme. The first is to do with the position of women within society and the second is to do with the upcoming EU Brexit deadline on March 29th. The 9th March is International Women’s Day, as a result of which we have chosen to programme two films either side of this date that foreground interesting or strong female characters. The Wife is bound to be in the Oscar discussion thanks to Glenn Close’s extraordinary performance, while Say My Name is the first feature scripted by Deborah Frances-White, host of the extremely popular podcast The Guilty Feminist.

Elsewhere in the programme there is another powerful performance from Emma Thompson in Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. Meg Ryan delivers one of the all-time great comic performances in our Valentine’s offering When Harry Met Sally. Whilst Pixar give us a family film that challenges stereotypical notions of gender roles, The Incredibles 2.

Our contribution to the Brexit discussion comes in the form of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue, a film that not only considers how European unity and co-operation might look, but also foregrounds a woman’s struggle toward empowerment. We are also screening Jim Jarmusch’s early nineties globe-trekking film Night on Earth, which gives us a sense of how humanity links together over space and time.

Over the course of 2019 we intend to show some great forgotten classics of 1943, all of which will be celebrating their 75th anniversary (from date of release). We open this mini-season with the great Vincente Minnelli musical A Cabin in the Sky, which should neatly dovetail with our first screening of 2019, Spike Lee’s highly controversial KuKluxKlan comedy BlacKkKlansman. Tributes are paid to screenwriter William Goldman and director Milos Forman with screenings of classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Finally, we are really pleased to be welcoming Scottish filmmaker Kenneth Glenaan to our Picture House on the 21st January for a special Q&A screening of his latest film Dirt Road to Lafayette, a musical coming-of-age drama that we are getting ahead of its theatrical release. We here at the Grassmarket Community Picture House would like to wish you all a most excellent 2019, and hope that you will spend a considerable chunk of the year watching great films with us.