This film is being re-screened to meet audience demand. This film was shown in the Te Kohitanga Expo Hall at 6pm on July 26th but we were unable to accomodate all members and supporters at the time due to a problem with the seating set up that week. 

DRAMA:

Florence Green [Emily Mortimer] is a young, free-spirited widow who moves to a remote coastal Suffolk town in the late 1950s, buying a dilapidated property and enterprisingly converting it into a bookshop. Making a success of it, largely by stocking Nabokov’s Lolita – it’s not long till she earns the envious displeasure of local grande dame Mrs Gamart [Patricia Clarkson] who wanted the property for a self-aggrandising “arts centre”. Battle lines are drawn, and allies are found: in Florence’s case, the bibliophile recluse Mr Brundish [Bill Nighy] who both respects the intellectual enlightenment she’s trying to bring to Hardborough while shrugging it off as a lost cause.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel ruefully pits conservative, heritage-fixated nostalgia against liberal progressiveness, making “The Bookshop” a particularly apt text to revisit in the ugly age of Brexit.