The Olive Tree / The Passion of Augustine - Double Feature

THE OLIVE TREE
RATING: M Offensive language 

★★★★½ "Storytelling at its finest" - Stuff.co.nz
★★★★ "A warm, gently rousing Spanish film" - Time Out

From Goya award-winning director Icíar Bollaín (Even the Rain) and BAFTA-winning writer Paul Laverty (I, Daniel Blake, The Angels Share, The Wind that Shakes the Barley) comes THE OLIVE TREE. 

Anna Castillo is Alma, a young woman very close to her grandfather (Manuel Cucala). The old man has retreated into depression and dementia since his grownup children cynically uprooted and sold off his beloved 2,000-year-old olive tree, against his will, to pay for a now bankrupt tourist-restaurant business. 

Anna discovers that the buyer of the tree is a Düsseldorf energy company, which has placed it in its glitzy lobby and uses it as a letterhead symbol of its entirely spurious green credentials. So Anna bamboozles some friends and family into going with her in a borrowed flatbed truck on a crazily quixotic mission to rescue the tree and bring it back to its rightful spot. 

Symbolic of what has happened in Spain over the last 15 years The Olive Tree is an earthy, quietly stirring Spanish fable that finds familial, regional, economic and environmental grievances inseparably tangled in its branches. It is however the human relationships that are most poignant here. 

THE PASSION OF AUGUSTINE
RATING: M Adult themes

★★★★½ "A nuanced, reflective and unashamedly intelligent film." 
"This is a warm, witty and genuine story, near-perfectly told. Great music too." - Stuff.co.nz

In a small convent school in rural Quebec, Simone Beaulieu, better known as Mother Augustine, runs a convent for girls in the 1960s.  There the convent provides a musical education to young women no matter what their socio-economic background.  She has turned the little convent into a musical treasure where the students have won every prestigious music competition in the region.