Focus on Andrea Arnold

If you feel that cinema sometimes walks the same beaten path, put on your gumboots as we tread new ground with the cinema of Andrea Arnold.

Have you ever considered what cinema codes as “normal”? As if by default, Hollywood generally codes a “normal” person as middle class, well-dressed and with aspirations so uniform that they don’t often bear spelling out. It’s a banal but dangerously powerful concept lurking under the radar of our shared cinematic universe.

Andrea Arnold’s cinema, however, exists on the margins of this Hollywood paradigm and in the shadowy locations that mainstream cinema often skirts around, rarely allowing audiences access to. From council flats in Essex to a dairy farm outside of the view of consumers, Andrea Arnold’s camera is there, capturing transient characters that “normal” people from the ‘burbs might blink and miss. Arnold tells stories with a deeply humanistic and compassionate perspective that places her adjacent to directors like Ken Loach and Agnès Varda – excellent company to keep.

Join us as we celebrate the masterful cinema of Andrea Arnold and the ways it illuminates the shadowy corners of an otherwise homogeneous cinematic landscape.

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)