To book a ticket for forthcoming screenings please contact the SHP Box Office on 01344 484123 or click the logo below to book via the SHP website

'SOUND IT OUT'
Director: Jeanie Finlay, UK, 2010, 75 minutes
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWo56xSJf0w

A swan song for the tactile pleasures of physical media, Sound It Out draws its name from the one of the last remaining record shops in Northeast England, a cosy bastion for what's become a progressively marginalized hobby. Befitting its outsider standing, the shop is a haven for misfits, collectors, and general eccentrics, a clientele director Jeannie Finlay recruits in explaining the significance of vinyl, which she posits as a symbol for the importance of human contact. It's not an understated approach, and sometimes a shallow one, but it pays dividends in highlighting the collateral damage of an increasingly digital world.

The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject. There are no teary proclamations about the death of vinyl or the physical form, and the world Finlay depicts isn't likely to disappear completely, it's just been moved to the fringes. This marginalization comes with the recognition that such specialized commerce has now mostly moved to the Internet, where shop owner David Laybourne has considered moving his business, to avoid the pressure of real-estate developers breathing down his neck. Sound It Out displays what would be lost in that conversion, namely the makeshift community formed between Laybourne and his customers, who use his store as a an alternative to the local pub, a place to congregate and discuss common interests.

Finlay does well not to psychoanalyse Laybourne or his customers, and mostly avoids playing up their status as colourful weirdoes, despite the film's "High Fidelity with a Northern accent" tagline. They're treated with a cautious humanism befitting the kind of hesitant film this is, a depiction that allows for an innocuous surface treatment of the subject. If Sound It Out never really digs its claws into its material, it at least approaches it with a careful level of thought and commitment.

In some sense, the film seems to sympathize with its subject formally, content to exist as a scrappy 75 minute document. There's not much visual ambition beyond static shots of the shop and its surroundings, and no real attempt to plumb the deeper implications of the subject. Instead, Sound It Out is content to exist as a modest portrait of a store that offers not only largely obsolete collectors' items, but also the resolute glimmer of human contact.

'WAY of the MORRIS'
Directors: Rob Curry, Co-director, Tim Plester, UK, 2011, 64 minutes
Trailer: http://www.telegraph21.com//video/way-of-the-morris

A heartfelt docu-ballad in praise of birthplace, bloodline and rural brotherhood, WAY OF THE MORRIS follows Tim on a deeply personal journey from the barley fields of his childhood to the killing fields of The Somme, as he traces the poignant link between the spirited folk revival of the mid-1970s and the true story of the young Adderbury Morris side so decimated by the carnage of the First World War.

Featuring contributions from singer/songwriter Billy Bragg and Fairport Convention's Chris Leslie, and utilizing treasured home-movie footage and rare village archive, what emerges is a timely and evocative exploration of the origins and impulses behind the Morris, and an attempt to understand its curious place within enchanted Britannia's ongoing story.