Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

This new adaptation of the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas was the summer box office smash in France.

Set against the tumultuous post-Napoleonic era, the story follows Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney), who is wrongly imprisoned and then escapes, crafting intricate revenge schemes against those who wronged him. This is a stunning and emotionally gratifying adventure film, built on rock-solid source material of course – with its timeless revenge theme still entertaining modern-day viewers. Compared to earlier adaptations, this latest version is briskly paced and rousingly acted by an all-around stellar ensemble. Everything about this robust and very enjoyable retelling of the classic is epic in scale: from the lavish sets and the orchestral score to the bold performances and the running time. We will include a short intermission.

France 2024 Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte 178m

The inspiring story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food - to heal the soil, benefit our health and provide for local communities.

“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster. This documentary tells the story of remarkable farmers, communities, small businesses, chefs and entrepreneurs who are leading the way to transform how our food is produced and consumed. Agroecology is an approach to farming that includes ‘regenerative’ farming techniques that work in harmony with, rather than against nature. It focuses on local food systems and shorter supply chains. ‘Six Inches of Soil’ tells the inspiring story of young British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food - to heal the soil, our health and provide for local communities.

UK 2024 Colin Ramsay 96m

Filmed in West Sussex, this local film focuses on an old man who works all alone to maintain his ancestral farmland, as his children prove to be at once both remote and controlling.

David (Rory Kinnear) and Laura (Emily Beecham) are in their early forties and tearaway underachievers who grew up on a still-lucrative family farm run by their father (Roger Marten). With David’s alcohol and drug addictions plaguing the majority of his adult life and Laura working on farms in sunnier climes like California and Spain, their eyes are drawn homeward as their father enjoys his final years of work, as they each proffer their case to inherit the land. This feature debut shows impressive audio-driven film storytelling, reaching something unique in its tale of an intransigent English farmer. The unique way this story is told is nothing less than inspired – we only ever see one of the characters, the farmer, although we never see him speak. Instead, the camera follows him as he goes about his business on the farm. We do however hear a series of answering machine messages from the children, because their father tends to have his phone turned off when he’s out in the fields. Filmed close to Pulborough, West Sussex.

UK 2023 Nicholas Parish 93m

Wim Wenders’ iconic vision of American alienation, starring Stanton as a weatherbeaten drifter, has held its mystery for 40 years.

Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and writer Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon. Paris, Texas is a landmark work in every sense: understated, powerful, sublime – worth seeing for Stanton’s performance alone.

West Germany / France / UK 1982 Wim Wenders 145m

Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, strive to breathe new life into the ailing Knepp estate near Pulborough. A dying landscape is healed against all odds, and goes on to thrive in astonishing ways.

Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. In 2000, faced with these dire circumstances, Isabella and Charlie took the risky decision. They abandoned farming, tore down the fences, introduced herds of Exmoor ponies, longhorn cattle and deer and some cute Tamworth pigs… and waited. 20 years later, largely by helping nature restore itself, Knepp has become a wildlife haven – and a beacon of hope for nature lovers. In this glorious documentary that engenders hope, you will be treated to beautiful Attenborough-style photography of the countryside reasserting itself and of the animals that returned to it. This is unmissable cinema (a huge hit across the country this Summer), and a source of pride for this area of the UK.

UK 2024 David Allen 75m

This gently absorbing documentary follows Amber, a happiness agent, as he travels the Bhutanese Himalayas surveying people's wellbeing for the government’s Happiness Survey.

How can you measure happiness? The country of Bhutan invented Gross National Happiness to do just that; the concept was first introduced by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the late 1970s as a wellbeing measurement, when he stated that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross Domestic Product. Amber travels door- to-door to meet people and measure how happy they are. At the age of 40, he is a a hopeless romantic who still dreams of finding love: a happiness agent in search of his own happiness. This slow burning documentary is suffused with warmth and combines breathtaking scenery with gentle humour whilst not avoiding the darker themes which also emerge, such as alcoholism and loneliness. As we accompany Amber on his cross-country road trip, meeting citizens from all walks of life, we are reminded of the fragility and beauty of our own happiness.  (Subtitles)

Bhutan/Hungary 2024 Director Arun Bhattarai & Dorottya Zurbó 94m

Night Courier

In the heart of Riyadh, where desperation and opportunity collide, this is the gripping tale of a mentally fragile man racing against time to save his ailing father.

‘Mandoob’ is a darkly comedic, gripping tale about the lives of Saudi Arabia’s gig workers, who toil in the shadows to make the fantastical lives of elites possible. Fahad’s (Mohammed Aldokhei) aspiring entrepreneur sister Sarah (Hajar Alshammari) and their ailing father Nasser (Mohammed Alttowayan) know that Fahad means well and genuinely wants what’s best for the family. But he is a restless call centre worker whose habitual lateness and apathy regarding irrational customers gets him fired. He becomes a delivery driver for an Uber-like service known as Mandoob (which loosely translates to “courier” in Arabic). This powerful and surprising film cleverly shows the realities of how hard it is to thrive as a gig worker in a system that’s designed to keep them nameless, faceless, perpetually busy and underpaid.

Saudi Arabia 2023 Ali Kalthami 110m

Instead of coming in from the Cold War, British agent Alec Leamas chooses to face another mission. Screening in conjunction with our ‘John le Carré on Screen’ Talk and complementing the Chichester Festival Theatre production.

At the height of the Cold War, British spy Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is nearly ready to retire, but first he has to take on one last dangerous assignment. Going deep undercover, he poses as a drunken, disgraced former MI5 agent in East Germany in order to gain information about colleagues who have been captured. When he himself is thrown in jail and interrogated, Leamas finds himself caught in a sinister labyrinth of plots and counter-plots unlike anything in his long career. This is the definitive anti-Bond spy movie and the best big-screen adaptation of John le Carré.

UK 1965 Martin Ritt 112m

The story of photographer Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II.

The film portrays a pivotal decade in the life of American war correspondent and photographer, Lee Miller (Kate Winslet). Miller's singular talent and unbridled tenacity resulted in some of the 20th century's most indelible images of war, including an iconic photo of Miller herself, posing defiantly in Hitler's private bathtub. Miller had a profound understanding and empathy for women and the voiceless victims of war. Her images display both the fragility and ferocity of the human experience. Alexander Skarsgård portrays her husband Roland Penrose, while Andy Samberg takes a dramatic turn as her partner in the field (and sometimes in the bedroom), David E. Scherman, a war correspondent for Life. Winslet shines in this biopic with a superbly powerful performance. She remains one of our most treasured actors and she brings a fierceness to this role.

USA 2023 Ellen Kuras 116m

Le Procès Goldman

Chronicles the trial of Pierre Goldman, a French left-wing revolutionary who was convicted of several robberies and later mysteriously murdered.

November 1975, and a second trial begins of French leftist radical Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter), who was subject to police prejudice and antisemitism, and accused of several armed robberies and the death of two chemists. As the trial proceeds, it becomes fairly evident, at least to the viewer, that the man is innocent. The question is therefore whether the French state will return a ‘not guilty’ verdict. The trial caused a media frenzy, and was attended by philosopher Régis Debray and actress Simone Signoret, elevating Goldman to cause célèbre status in the wake of May 1968 with the government, especially the criminal justice system, pitted against the left. Alongside the recent ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ and ‘Saint Omer’, this continues a recent trend for quality French indie courtroom dramas. (Subtitles)

France 2023 Cédric Kahn 115m

Let’s Spend the Night Together

The Sexual Revolution of the 60s on Screen

With the new play ’Redlands’, an account of the trial of the Rolling Stones in Chichester in 1967, at the Festival Theatre, this is the first of two talks this season looking at the wider context of the trial on the big screen

Sat 21 Sep 10:30

NT Live

Jodie Comer's West End debut. 'Prima Facie' takes us to the heart of where emotion and experience collide with the rules of the game.

Thu 12 Sep 19:45

Sat 21 Sep 15:15

25th Anniversary Performance

The epic love story tells the tragic tale of young bar girl Kim, orphaned by war, who falls in love with American GI Chris – but their lives are torn apart by the fall of Saigon.

Sun 22 Sep 14:45

Moin Hussain’s arresting debut feature about an alienated night-shift worker turns the humble service station into a nightmarish modern limbo

Adam a shy and quiet protagonist working the night shift at Sky Peals Services, a motorway service station and lives a small and lonely life. Upon hearing that his estranged father has died, he finds himself in search of answers. When Adam learns that his late father believed that he was an alien, he becomes more sensitive to his own surroundings and starts to become more observant – reviewing footage of his father from before he died, experiencing blackouts, hearing noises. This isn’t your typical thriller. Adam isn’t looking for some sort of killer. The film is more interested in asking questions than giving answers. All these events are effectively conveyed with against a backdrop of imaginative production design with its use of wide, empty, dark spaces – likely an allusion to the main character’s state.

Part of Venice’s International Critics’ Week selection, ‘Sky Peals’ probes the existential questions of life in this haunting and impressive feature-length debut.

UK 2023 Moin Hussain 91m

Amu Darya: River to a Missing Sea

Through oral histories and tales of loss, adaptation and hope, this short film presents a memory of the Amu Darya – the Central Asian river that no longer reaches its destination. It tells how local communities are dealing with the river’s desiccation and how the USSR turned the world’s fourth largest lake – the Aral Sea – into its youngest desert. The human story of an environmental disaster.

With poem translated by Chichester poet Andrew Staniland after he visited the region and got to know the young filmmakers from the Amu Darya Project.

UK 2024 James Chapman, Annie Liddell & Oscar Fraser Turner 28m

Our Sea Forest

Narrated by Chris Packham, this moving documentary tells of the remarkable regeneration of the vast underwater kelp forest off our Sussex shores. Told through the eyes of 74-year-old Eric Smith, a free-diver of the forest since he was a child, it charts the destruction of this once-thriving ecosystem by trawling to its miraculous recovery in recent years. Teeming with sea life and hope. Filmed at Shoreham, Goring and Bognor Regis. Thanks to BBC1 and Big Wave Productions Ltd.

Introduced by Sarah Cunliffe, director of Sussex-based Big Wave Productions which made the documentary aired on the BBC.

UK 2023 Sarah Cunliffe 30m