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The Bookshop (15)

Showing times:

• Fri 20 Jul: 1.30pm
• Fri 20 Jul: 7.30pm
• Sat 21 Jul: 6.30pm
• Sun 22 Jul: 7pm
• Wed 25 Jul: 1.30pm

Dir. Isabel Coixet, Spain, UK, Germany, 2017, 113 mins

When a woman decides to open a bookshop in her rural town she is met with polite but ruthless opposition. Based on the celebrated novel, this is a sumptuous and intimate film about overcoming the odds.

Set in 1959, Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a free-spirited widow, puts grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop – the first such shop in the sleepy seaside town of Hardborough, England. Fighting damp, cold and considerable local apathy she struggles to establish herself but soon her fortunes change for the better.

By exposing the narrow-minded local townsfolk to the best literature of the day including Nabokov’s scandalising Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, she opens their eyes thereby causing a cultural awakening in a town which has not changed for centuries.

Her activities bring her a kindred spirit and ally in the figure of Mr. Brundish (Bill Nighy) who is himself sick of the town’s stale atmosphere. But this mini social revolution soon brings her fierce enemies: she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and also crosses Mrs. Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), Hardborough’s vengeful, embittered alpha female who is herself a wannabe doyenne of the local arts scene.

When Florence refuses to bend to Gamart’s will, they begin a struggle not just for the bookshop but for the very heart and soul of the town.

‘Bill Nighy shines as Brundish’
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

???? ‘Evokes the sensation of losing yourself in a good book. Emily Mortimer is simply perfect’
ONE ROOM WITH A VIEW

Triple F-Rated:
Directed by a woman, written by a woman and starring a significant woman. 

F-Rating is a new rating for films directed by women, written by women and/or with significant female characters on screen, in their own right. Find out more here >>

Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix