£6.00
Conc. £Pay What You Can
Doors 2:00pm
Film 2:30pm
A film and book club for avid readers and cinephiles. Every second Sunday afternoon of the month, we meet to watch a film adaptation of a book or a writer’s biopic.
dir. BARRY JENKINS
year. 2018
country. USA
run-time. 116 min
rating. 15
Book: James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)
Gearing up for Valentine’s day, our February edition of the DC Film and Book Club is a screening of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), the follow-up from Oscar winning director Barry Jenkins.
Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novella of the same title, this romantic drama follows a young black couple, Tish and Fonny, as they fall in love and start their own family amidst the struggles and racial tensions of seventies New York. When Fonny is falsely convicted of rape and sent to jail, the fierce and heavily pregnant Tish fights to clear his name.
Despite its dark subject matter, James Baldwin’s rhythmic prose transfers beautifully to the cinema screen, with ethereal, richly-coloured cinematography and a luscious score by Nicholas Brittel. As Guardian Film Critic Peter Bradshaw noted, If Beale Street Could Talk is ‘woozy with its own beauty and dignity, a film going transcendently high in the face of a racist world going low’.
Please join us after the screening for tea, cake and conversation.
“Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1970s novel becomes a heart-stopping cinematic love story, told with a tough but tender truthfulness that left me weeping and swooning. It’s a terrific film, as sinewy as it is sensuous, interweaving stark social-realist themes of prejudice, oppression and imprisonment with a poetic evocation of love, loss and, ultimately, transcendence.”
