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Accounts For Streaming Services

During this long period where the council have closed The Clocktower to all public access we are promoting some films for streaming directly to your TV via a computer or mobile device. Please be aware that although we choose what films we feel are most suitable for our audience, not all films are made available for streaming by distributors. Therefore, some films which are released for theatrical exhibition (in areas that are not in lockdown) may not necessarily be available as a streaming choice.

To avoid confusion regarding accounts that you may be asked to create or log into in order to stream films via our website, below is an explanation of the requirement.

These accounts are not related to The David Lean Cinema but are associated with the distributor of the film. The films that we promote on this website are from several distributors so depending on the film that you wish to watch, you may need to hold an account with more than one distributor. Once you have registered an account to watch a film, please take a note of the distributor involved and the password that you registerd with so that you can more easily watch another film from the same distributor. If you are not sure who the distributor is when you create the account, you will find this information on the website front page (by the film listing) or in the film page itself. Some distributors do not require you to hold an account with them.

If you have any problems with this process then please use our Contact Form with details of the difficulties you are experiencing and we will respond to you with some help.

David Lean Cinema Operations Manager.

MISTER UNIVERSO

N/C 15+ MISTER UNIVERSO
2016 | Dir Tairo Caroli/Rainer Frimmel | 90min | Austria Italy

Young, disenchanted lion-tamer Tairo is out to recover his missing lucky talisman – a bar of iron bent into a horseshoe shape and given to him as a 5-yr-old child by ‘Mister Universo’, without which his life is bereft. Shot on Super 16mm, this fast-moving neo-realist road movie is an engaging, and unusual, hybrid of documentary and fiction, in which real-life circus folk play themselves. In a story full of colour and rough charm, Tairo’s quest reunites him with old friends and colleagues and fast becomes a whirlwind tour of Italy’s circus culture. Aided by his quiet admirer and contortionist extraordinaire Wendy, the film culminates in a feel-good ending as Tairo finally runs ‘Mister Universo’ to ground. Italian with English subtitles.

“…rich with exciting circus imagery that gives the intimate quest an expressionistic backdrop. Both emotionally accessible and cinematic, Mister Universo endows its bizarre setting with warmth” – Indiewire.

Watch at home now for £7.49 (with promo code above). Stream available for 48 hours after play started.
Distributor: YourScreen – create account or login.
Film run extended until 28 February February 2021.

Mister Universo won the xtraVALUE Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 2016 Viennale and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival 2016, “For its simplicity and generosity. For its affection and warmth. For we felt better when we left the cinema. For the fact that the most beautiful stories have open endings.”

ROUNDS

N/C 15+ ROUNDS
2019| Dir Stephen Komandarev | 107mins | Bulgaria

One night – seemingly just like any other. Two police officers find the body of the well-known drug addict Lazar near railroad tracks in Sofia. That is how the night on November 9th, 2019 begins – thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regime change in Bulgaria. Through a kaleidoscope of intertwining stories, we follow three teams of police officers, patrolling the streets of Sofia and doing their job the way they believe is right, while facing the challenges posed by the current Bulgarian reality. A story about lives saved and lives lost, about survival and failure, about the goodness that never goes unpunished and the dignity we are trying to preserve. A few hours in the life of a society that is losing its purpose, in search of the result of three decades of transition. Stories – equal parts sad and amusing, just like our way of life. Bulgarian with English subtitles.

ROUNDS is the second film in Stephan Komandarev’s trilogy in which he continues to search for a way to diagnose the crisis in Bulgaria and Europe today, focusing on themes such as inequality, loss of values and lack of moral. As a former doctor, he firmly believes that the right diagnosis is the basis of a good treatment.

Watch at home now for £7.49 (with promo code above). Stream available for 48 hours after play started. Q&A with director Stephen Kormandarev is here – recorded during the 2019 Cheltenham International Film Festival.
Distributor: YourScreen – create account or login.
Film run ends on 28 February 2021.

AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN

N/C 15+ AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN
2019 | Dir Louise Archambault | 127min | Canada

As acclaimed director Louise Archambault’s elegiac and charming AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN opens, we meet three hermits living in cabins in the Quebec countryside, miles from civilization. Tom (Rémy Girard), Charlie (Gilbert Sicotte), and Ted (Kenneth Welsh) fled society years ago, and have eked out a back-to-the-land existence, selling “weed” to the closest locals with help from local hotelier Stephen (Éric Robidoux).
However, their lifestyle is increasingly endangered by nature, infirmity, and age as Ted collapses from a heart attack. Photographer / researcher Ange-Aimee (Eve Landry) threatens to disrupt their lives when she starts looking for survivors of a catastrophic blaze that happened decades ago, most notably Ted, whose actions during the fire have assumed heroic stature.
A poignant meditation on the possibilities of living outside modernity, AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN is a tribute to the need to live independently and on one’s own terms — and to those courageous enough to pursue this. (It’s also a cry for respect for people and their choices, regardless of age.) Driven by a cast boasting some of Quebec’s most esteemed performers — including Andrée Lachapelle, whose career stretches back to 1954. French with English subtitles.

As a thank you for supporting us, you will get 25% off each ticket purchase. Just enter DLYS at checkout. You will also be supporting the David Lean Cinema as we get a share of every ticket sold using this promo code.
Watch at home now for £7.49 (using promo code DLYS). Stream available for 48 hours after play started.
Distributor: YourScreen – create account or login.
Film run ends on 28 February 2021.

SUPERNOVA

SUPERNOVA
2019 | Dir Bartosz Kruhlik | 78min | Poland

It was supposed to be a nice, easy Sunday morning. The sun was already up, bright and strong, giving the air its chalky tint. The half-dried grass, the quiet country road, the loud cow – everything in the opening scene of Bartosz Kruhlik’s stellar feature debut, SUPERNOVA screams “bucolic”. But soon, four people show up shattering the peace. In a matter of minutes, events will interweave the destinies of this broken family with that of a politician, (Marcin Hycnar), and of a policeman (Marek Braun), who arrives at the scene. The outcomes are closely observed by the locals, armed with smartphones and with their curiosity, which will soon turn into righteous anger. Everything that follows will seem surprising, shocking, yet inevitable: the narrow road transforms into what looks like a scene from an ancient tragedy, with a cruel deity deciding on the fate of men. Polish with English subtitles.

Watch at home now for £7.49 (with promo code DLYS). Stream available for 48 hours after play started.
Distributor: YourScreen – create account or login.
Film run extended to 14 February 2021.

THE MOLE AGENT

THE MOLE AGENT
2020 | Dir Maite Alberdi | 84min | Chile

Sergio is a Chilean spy. Sort of. At least, he is offered the role of one after a casting session organized by Detective Romulo, a private investigator who needs a credible mole to infiltrate a retirement home. Romulo’s client, the concerned daughter of a resident, suspects her mother is being abused and hires him to find out what is really happening.
However, Sergio is 83, not 007, and not an easy trainee when it comes to technology and spying techniques. But he is a keen student, looking for ways to distract himself after recently losing his wife. What could be a better distraction than some undercover spy action? While gathering intelligence, Sergio grows close to several residents and realizes that the menacing truth beneath the surface is not what anyone had suspected.
Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent is a stylish combination of an observational documentary and a spy movie, with sleek camerawork and wonderfully watchable characters. It’s a unique meditation on compassion and loneliness that will infiltrate your heart and never let go.
Spanish with English subtitles.

The David Lean Cinema shares a proportion of the £9.99 ticket price with the distributor. Watch at home now.
Available in your account for 28 days after purchase and for 48 hours after pressing play.
Distributor: Dogwoof – create account or login.
Film run ends on 02 April 2021.
An explanation of why you may need to have more than one account for streaming films that we promote is given here.

Coming Soon

Coming Soon – The Mole Agent

Back to films list……

Streaming Exercise

FALLING

FALLING (+ Q&A)
2020 | Dir Viggo Mortensen | 112min | Canada | UK

John (Viggo Mortensen) lives with his partner, Eric (Terry Chen), and their daughter, Mónica (Gabby Velis), in California, far from the traditional rural life he left behind years ago. John’s father, Willis (Lance Henriksen), a headstrong man from a bygone era, lives alone on the isolated farm where John grew up. Willis is in the early stages of dementia, making running the farm on his own increasingly difficult, so John brings him to stay at his California home so that he and his sister Sarah (Linney) might help him find a place near them to relocate to. Unfortunately, their best intentions ultimately run up against Willis’s adamant refusal to change his way of life in the slightest.
During his stay at John’s California home, tension builds between Willis and the rest of the family. Willis’s abrasive nature, by turns caustic and occasionally funny, is aggravated by his memory loss, bringing past and present into conflict and causing old wounds and years of mutual mistrust between father and sone rise to the surface.

The David Lean Cinema shares a proportion of the ticket price with the distributor when purchased through the link on this page or click here.
Available to watch for 48 hours after purchase.
Distributor: Modern Films – no account required.

Includes Q&A with Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Laura Linney and Terry Chen hosted by Edith Bowman.
Film run ends on 31 March 2021

A GIRL FROM MOGADISHU

A GIRL FROM MOGADISHU
Dir Mary McGuckian | 113min | Belgium | Ireland | Morocco

‘A Girl from Mogadishu’ is based on the testimony of Ifrah Ahmed. Fleeing war-torn Somalia in 2006, she is trafficked to Ireland where as an asylum-seeking refugee, she undergoes a traumatic medical examination which reveals the extent of her mutilation as a child. Traumatized by the memory, she turns her experiences into a force for good, emerging as one of the world’s most foremost global activists against Female Genital Mutilation.
‘Silence may be the rust on the razor that threatened to cut my throat, but it was not my tongue they cut.’ Language: English.

Donna Ferguson discusses the film in The Guardian.

More reading on the subject matter of the film is below.

‘My name is Ifrah Ahmed, I am an Irish Citizen and a survivor of FGM’… This is how the Girl from Mogadishu consistently introduces herself on the world stage, as an international activist against FGM/C and this is her story…
Circumcised at eight years of age. Raped by wandering militiamen at twelve years of age. Fully infibulated again at thirteen years of age and then married off by her grandmother to a fifty-year old man who regularly beat her; Ifrah Ahmed runs away to a place she had once known as home in war torn Mogadishu to find it had become the kind of battleground now known as ‘Black Hawk Down’.
A neighbour, recognizing her as the daughter of a woman whose sister had emigrated from Mogadishu to Minnesota, undertakes to find a way to get her out and sends a message through the Somali grapevine to seek help on her behalf.
Within days, a stranger appears at the door to tell her that he has been sent by her aunt from Minnesota and that she should follow him. She gathers her things into a plastic bag and sets out on the most perilous journey imaginable up through war – torn Somalia into Ethiopia all the way to Addis Ababa Airport in the company of traffickers. Finally landing, not in Minnesota, America – but in Dublin, Ireland.
Not a word of English, no prior education and hardly an item of clothing against the cold, she finds the food bizarre but the welcome hearty in the Irish asylum-seeking system. Her fears begin to subside and her traumatic days, she thinks, are behind her, until a routine medical smear test elicits such looks of horror on the faces of her Irish doctors that she suffers a profound sense of shame.
They say that anger is the flip side of shame. Channelling the feelings on both sides of that coin, she reacts incredibly quickly, learns English at break – neck speed and unearths an enviable technical talent for harnessing social media.
Within months she is campaigning for better conditions for asylum – seekers arriving in Ireland. She galvanizes her fellow refugees into action and sets up the ‘United Youth of Ireland’ to campaign for more understanding of foreign immigrants in Ireland. Joining ‘Amnesty International’ she becomes one of their most effective activists.
She works with a number of other NGOs, including UNICEF on special projects related to FGM. And single-handedly harasses every politician in Ireland right the way up to the president to pass FGM/C criminal justice legislation in Ireland.
As an Irish citizen, she presents her testimony on behalf of Ireland’s MEPs on the occasion of the ratification of the UN Convention against FGM/C at the European Parliament and it is passed unanimously.
Thus commences her now lauded professional career as an international activist.