Remember “The Full Monty” (1997) from director Peter Cattaneo, the hilarious feature about unemployed steel workers reborn as strippers? Cattaneo’s fun new movie follows a different ensemble, the wives of deployed service men who take up choral singing. Kristin Scott Thomas does “posh” brilliantly as the meddling colonel’s wife on the army base who feels obligated to take the lead in boosting morale through uplifting activities to distract wives from the grim realities their husbands face in Afghanistan. Together with Sharon Horgan as a totally sympathetic, unaffected Irishwoman they forge a successful band of women who delight as choral singers and realize their unlikely goal. This warm and sensitive crowd-pleaser is based on a true story.

UK 2019 (112 minutes)

Sponsor: British Consulate General San Francisco

A sweet romance set against the greenery of Hampstead, a posh London suburb, is irresistible when the lovers of a certain age are played by Diane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson. Following the death of her British husband, Keaton finds herself financially strapped – an unusual predicament for a Hampstead resident. Gleeson is even further down the ladder, an Irish squatter living in a rancid shed. When neighbors try to evict him, she rushes to his rescue. The film is based on a true story but plays like a fairytale.

UK 2017 (102 minutes)

Sponsor: Fran and Gerry Schall

Ben Mendelsohn returns to his native Australia to make this touching family drama. He plays the psychiatrist father of a 16-year-old losing her battle against cancer. He and his wife manage to hold it together until their daughter, a beloved only child, falls head over heels for an older drug dealer with a magnetic smile and a touch of blarney. After initially warning her to stay away, the parents realize that this inappropriate beau makes their daughter feel alive. Based on a hit Australian play, Shannon Murphy’s first feature has been collecting raves at film festivals.

Australia 2019 (120 minutes)

Guest: Ben Mendelsohn

After a rich career in Australian films and television, including a breakout role in “The Year My Voice Broke,” Ben Mendelsohn became known internationally for the crime drama “Animal Kingdom.” Since then he has had roles in “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Rogue One,” “Captain Marvel” and “Spider-Man: Far From Home.” He won an Emmy for the Netflix series “Bloodline,” and is currently starring in HBO’s “The Outsider.” He will be interviewed by fellow Aussie James Wooley, the new executive Director of Frameline, San Francisco’s International LGBTQ+Film Festival. Wooley previously was head of marketing and customer relations at the Sydney Film Festival.

Co-Presenter: SFFILM

Sponsor: Australian Consulate General San Francisco

The beginning and end of a love affair are common fodder for movies. But what about the middle ground when you’re still perceptively in love? The fireworks may have calmed yet you can’t imagine life without your mate. This is the terrain covered in “Ordinary Love.” Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville turn in remarkably nuanced performances as a long married couple whose placid existence is threatened with the wife’s breast cancer diagnosis. Both uplifting and painful to watch while never sliding into melodrama, “Ordinary Love” forces a viewer to reflect on his or her own relationships and on mortality.

UK 2019 (92 minutes)

A disgustingly rich London fashion mogul called Sir Richard McCreadie –nicknamed “Greedy”– decides to throw himself an ostentatious Romanesque 60th birthday party on the island of Mykonos, going so far as to import the real live lion from the Colosseum scene in the movie “Gladiator.” Fresh off playing sad sack Stan Laurel, Steve Coogan glitters and glows as Sir Richard in a Roman toga and gold plated crown setting off his tan and alpha-male silver-grey hair. As obstacles mount, hideous truths are revealed about the host’s past. Prolific director Michael Winterbottom serves up, in the words of one critic, “a breezy, funny, unsubtle scattershot satire-melodrama all about the moral squalor of the superrich.”

UK 2019 (100 minutes)

Purchase your Mostly British Film Festival Series Passes and get priority seating for all films.  Discounts go to members of theSFFILM, the Fromm Institute, the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation and people 65 and over.

Ralph Fiennes’ ambitious directing effort centers on Russian ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev from his humble beginnings in Siberia to his life-changing visit to France as part of the Kirov Ballet, culminating in his dramatic defection to the West in 1961. Scripted by Britain’s legendary screenwriter David Hare (“The Hours,” “The Reader”), this dance-heavy biopic features acclaimed Ukrainian dancer Oleg Ivenko as Nureyev, showing a fierce physicality in his first film role. Fiennes plays an understated role as Pushkin, St. Petersburg’s most respected dance instructor, who sees something in Nureyev’s passion, prizing it above pure technical skill.  Fiennes plays the role in Russian, which he learned just enough of to sound convincing. Adele Exarchopoulous (“Blue is the Warmest Color”) acts against type as the reserved Chilean heiress who opens Nureyev’s eyes to the West’s liberated attitudes to art and sexuality. The film, which Variety calls “lovely and elegant” ends with a gripping scene at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport which– even though we know the outcome– leaves us breathless. UK 2018 (117 minutes)

Opening Night
5:00 PM Reception Laureate Bar and Lounge
444 Presidio Avenue
Sponsored by British Heritage Travel Magazine

Writer/director Ben Hackworth brings us a retired opera singer, Celeste, a star fifteen years ago who is now attempting a come-back. At forty something she is living in a crumbling paradise somewhere in the lush rainforest of north-eastern Australia. Set against this wondrous tropical backdrop, Radha Mitchell (appearing in person at Mostly British) plays the nervy diva with resplendent theatricality, mourning the death of her husband ten years earlier and finding comfort from drink and her friend/producer Grace, she prepares for the show. Enter her estranged stepson Jack (Thomas Cocquerel), no longer a teenager, but now described so eloquently by the Hollywood Reporter as “a virile slab of wayward young manhood.” Indeed, he is and tension mounts.  Enigmatic and at times mysterious, this film is always engaging, offering stunning location shots to bask in.

Australia 2018 (105 minutes)

GUEST OF HONOR: RADHA MITCHELL
Australian actress Radha Mitchell will join us at the festival with two of her new films, which she will introduce and participate in a Q & A following the screenings. She stars in “Flammable Children,” as a parent trying to raise children in the wild 1970s in Sydney. In “Celeste” she gives a touching and vulnerable performance as a renowned opera diva who gives up her career for the man she loves and moves to a rainforest. Her films “Looking for Grace” and “The Waiting City” played in the Australian Spotlight section of the Mostly British festival. The critical success of “High Art,” one of her early Hollywood movies, gained her a wider audience. She has also worked in Hollywood on “Neverland” and “Melinda and Melinda.” Woody Allen hired her as the lead character Melinda without an audition on the strength of seeing one of her movies.

GUEST OF HONOR: BEN HACKWORTH
The director of “Celeste” had an auspicious beginning as a filmmaker. His short film, “Martin Four,” made while he was in film school, was selected to show at the Cannes Film Festival. His debut feature “Corroboree” was chosen for the Toronto International by Noah Cowan, now executive director of SFFILM. Hackworth is one of three Australian directors to be awarded a prestigious Cannes Film Festival Residence to develop a screenplay. “Celeste” opened the Brisbane International Film Festival in the city where Hackworth makes his home.

Introduction to “Celeste” by Mitchell and Hackworth. Both will be interviewed following the screening by SFFILM Executive Director Noah Cowan.

Hard to imagine that 25 years has passed since Charles met Carrie. As the very British Charles, Hugh Grant was catapulted to stardom. He won hearts on both sides of the Atlantic as the perennial best man mumbling and stuttering his way to heart-throb status seemingly perpetually dressed in a morning coat. Andie MacDowell is the sparkling, wealthy American who shows up as a guest at the first wedding where her flirtation with Charles startles him with its intensity.  Their romance is consummated before the night is over. Yet, cowed by Carrie’s bracing eagerness, Charles is too reticent to acknowledge his feelings for her. An air of romantic uncertainty hangs over the couple through three more weddings and a funeral as the audience is drawn into caring about their fate. With a great cast of British actors like Kirstin Scott Thomas and Simon Callow and directed with light hearted yet nevertheless seductive enchantment by Mike Newell, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” set a high standard for romcoms that has only rarely been matched. UK 1994 (117 minutes) 

5:30 p.m. Champagne and cookies reception
Laureate Bar and Lounge
444 Presidio Avenue

6 p.m Screening Celebrating the Silver Anniversary of Four Weddings and a Funeral

This wonderfully daft comedy, based on a documentary about a real-life synchronized male swim team in Sweden, could be thought of as “The Full Monty” in Speedos. A motley crew of middle-aged men  form a close friendship unusual for the male species when they decide to compete in a world championship–despite the fact that they will never be mistaken for bodybuilders. The Guardian describes their physiques as “unselfconscious moobs and guts, sagging thighs and fading tattoos.” Their unfashionable swimming caps and goggles make them look more like nerds than athletes. The team is led by the always humorous Rob Brydon as an accountant incapacitated by a midlife crisis and Rupert Graves as a smooth-talking real estate broker looking for some action after a divorce. Although he hadn’t imagined it would happen underwater, joining the team turns out for him as well as his teammates to be more gratifying than any of them could have imagined.  UK 2018 (96 minutes).

Sponsored by Stratos Group LLC- Stuart Keirle