This film was released on Friday 18th December 2015 and is no longer screening. 

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Director Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, Keyhole) is famed for drawing on the history of cinema, particularly the silent era, to inform his films, but The Forbidden Room,  co-directed with Evan Johnson, represents some of his best work yet, in which these influences and interests are synthesised to create something new and wildly original. An Exquisite Corpse variant, the film follows over a dozen strands which segue and intrude into one another with an invigorating lack of logic, creating instead a convoluted, matryoshka doll-style narrative.

Included in these threads are a guide on taking a bath, a submarine crew nervous about their volatile cargo, a lumberjack seeking to rescue a damsel in distress, and the dreams of a sentient volcano, populated by a starry cast featuring, amongst others, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, and Elina Löwensohn. (Notes by Kevin Coyne.)

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