in-store offers
Label promotion
New Wave Films
New Wave Films bring bold and boundary pushing cinema to Britain, with no subtitles spared. Dealing in the kind of offbeat, slow burn, soul rattling international flicks that make multiplexes nervous – stuff from the likes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Lucrecia Martel.
We have a sale across the New Wave catalogue on now!
Il Buco
Il Buco
Available on DVD & Blu-ray
During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe’s highest building is being built in Italy’s prosperous North. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland. The bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 meters below Earth, is reached for the first time. The intruders’ venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighbouring village, but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino plateau whose solitary life begins to interweave with the group’s journey. IL BUCO chronicles a visit through unknown depths of life and nature and parallels two great voyages to the interior.
World Premiere and Winner of the Special Jury Prize – Venice International Film Festival
martin eden
martin eden
Available on DVD & Blu-ray
The sailor, Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli), descends from Naples, working class, but his fate is changed forever when he defends a young boy from a beating by a security guard on the docks. The boy repays him for his kindness by inviting him into his bourgeois home, and it is there that Eden meets Elena (Jessica Cressy), the daughter of an upper-crust industrial family. It is love at first sight for Eden. He resolves to become an accomplished writer to elevate himself to the family’s social standing and eventually marry her. He proves himself quickly as an autodidact, but grapples with social politics. His pursuit of his individual success is in conflict with his humble origins and the proletariat’s cause. Left-wing journalist, Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), guides him deeper into socialist circles, resulting not only in a political reawakening and destructive anxiety, but also to a severing with Elena and her elite world.
Venice International Film Festival World Premiere 2019 (Official Competition)
Venice International Film Festival Winner – Best Actor, Luca Marinell
ash is purest white
ash is purest white
Available on DVD & Blu-ray
Qiao (Zhao Tao) lives in a depressed mining town. Her boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), is a dashing gangster who works for a corrupt property developer. After his boss is murdered, Bin ascends in rank within the Jianghu (a criminal brotherhood) and finds himself vulnerable to rival hostilities. When Bin and Qiao are arrested, she makes a fateful decision: she takes the blame to save Bin. After five years in prison, she emerges to find her world has transformed. Her former associates have moved into legitimate businesses, while Bin has found another woman. Qiao seeks revenge, but, more importantly, she searches for a new identity in a changing China — a search that will take her to Three Gorges Dam and toward a powerful revelation.
Venice International Film Festival World Premiere 2019 (Official Competition)
Venice International Film Festival Winner – Best Actor, Luca Marinell
the wild pear tree
the wild pear tree
Available on DVD & Blu-ray
Sinan returns from his studies in the city of Çanakkale to his parents’ home in the small rural town of Çan. He hopes to publish a book of essays and short stories (or what he describes as a “quirky auto-fiction meta-novel”). But his teacher father Idris is an addictive gambler, so much so that his mother and sister have become reluctantly accustomed to making do without food or electricity. So Sinan, with his writing dreams, worrying that we will be reduced, after army service, to teaching in the remote East, wanders around town, visiting his grandparents, encountering old friends, all the while looking for funding for his book.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
available on dvd & blu-ray
Oozing atmosphere with its noirish neon glow, the film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father’s funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him. Sculpting time and space through virtuosic technical feats, Bi’s film yields successive visual and aural delights. With talismanic cues and motifs of uncanny doubling, the film is bisected — its first half recast in the second through a vertiginous, trance-inducing, hour-long single take in 3D. A hushed, hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight — and featuring the formidable Sylvia Chang as Wildcat’s mother — Long Day’s Journey Into Night leads the viewer on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue.
winter sleep
winter sleep
available on dvd & blu-ray
The Palme d’Or winner from Nuri Bilge Ceylan is set in the hilly landscape of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, where the local celebrity, a former actor Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), owns a small hotel cut into the hillside. It’s now winter and the off-season. Aydin runs the hotel with his younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), writes a column for the local newspaper, and is playing with the idea of producing a book on Turkish theatre.
He has also inherited local properties from his father, but leaves the business of rent collection to his agent. When a local boy, resentful of his father’s humiliation at the hands of the agent, throws a stone at a jeep whilst Aydin and his agent are driving in it, Aydin ducks out of any responsibility or involvement.
As the film progresses, the cocoon in which the self-satisfied and insular man has wrapped himself is gradually unravelled . In a series of magnificent set pieces, the film takes a close look at Aydin’s interactions with his wife, his recently divorced sister, and the family of the stone-throwing boy.
Aydin is finally brought face-to-face with who and what he truly is.
The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão
The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão
available on dvd & blu-ray
Rio de Janeiro, 1950. Eurídice, 18, and Guida, 20, are two inseparable sisters living at home with their conservative parents. Although immersed in a traditional life, each one nourishes a dream: Eurídice of becoming a renowned pianist, Guida of finding true love.
In a dramatic turn, they are separated by their father and forced to live apart. They take control of their separate destinies, while never giving up hope of finding each other.
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes Film Festival 2019.
Brazil’s entry for the Oscars 2020 International Film.
zama
zama
available on dvd & blu-ray
Lucrecia Martel’s first film in 10 years premiered in Venice 2017 to huge acclaim.
Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind.
The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit.
It is adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic of Argentine literature, recently published by the New York Review of Books – and available to buy here. New Wave Films also released Lucrecia Martel’s previous film, The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza).
an elephant sitting still
an elephant sitting still
available on dvd
This is the first and last film from its director Hu Bo. After its premiere in Berlin in 2018 where it was awarded a Fipresci prize, the film has toured festivals worldwide, picking up huge critical acclaim. It had just been awarded Best Film in the Golden Horse Awards.
In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the world in which they find themselves. Among them is schoolboy Bu, on the run after pushing a bully down the stairs and accidentally injuring him. Bu’s classmate Ling has run away from her mother and fallen for the charms of her teacher. The bully’s older brother Cheng feels responsible for the suicide of a friend. And finally, along with many other characters whose fates are inextricably bound together, there’s Mr. Wang, a sprightly pensioner whose son wants to offload him into a home. In virtuoso visual compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk, when the train to Manzhouli is set to depart.
once upon a time in anatolia
once upon a time in anatolia
available on dvd & blu-ray
The director of Uzak and Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has established himself as one of the new masters of cinema. With his new film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, he offers us an epic and rigorous tale of a night and day in a murder investigation. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a beautifully photographed crime drama about police and prosecutors grimly locating a buried body through one long night in the Anatolian steppes. As the corpse is exhumed, many long-buried thoughts and fears are disinterred in the minds of the hard-bitten lawmen
Winner Grand Prix, Cannes 2011
cemetery of splendour
cemetery of splendour
available on blu-ray
Soldiers with a mysterious sleeping sickness are transferred to a temporary clinic in a former school. The memory-filled space becomes a revelatory world for housewife and volunteer Jenjira, as she watches over Itt, a handsome soldier with no family visitors. Jen befriends young medium Keng who uses her psychic powers to help loved ones communicate with the comatose men. Doctors explore ways, including coloured light therapy, to ease the mens’ troubled dreams. Jen discovers Itt’s cryptic notebook of strange writings and blueprint sketches. There may be a connection between the soldiers’ enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site that lies beneath the clinic. Magic, healing, romance and dreams are all part of Jen’s tender path to a deeper awareness of herself and the world around her.
the blue caftan
available on blu-ray & dvd
The Blue Caftan is built around an emotional triangle between a middle-aged couple and a younger man. Set in the medina of the Moroccan town Salé, Mina and her husband Halim run a small shop selling traditional caftans, but the arrival of a handsome new apprentice, Youssef, stirs problems when Halim realises his attraction to him.
The Blue Caftan won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize for the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes 2022 and was Morocco’s entry for the 2023 Oscars.