Baltic Cinema: Together! Solidarity and Community on Screen
Together! Solidarity and Community on Screen
November 2026 – March 2027
In response to our exhibition Close to Home, the films in this season all circle ideas of community and solidarity and ask key questions about the limits of each. They are rooted in stories of working-class lives, from across different countries and times, from Gateshead to Prague via Helsinki. They explore the most basic conditions of life – labour and housing – and the determination, integrity and compassion to fight the erosion of those conditions.
Thursday 5 November | 18:30 Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (15)
Wednesday 19 November | 18:30 Panelstory, or How a Housing Development is Born (12)
Saturday 5 December | 14:30 The Nothing Factory (12)
Saturday 23 January | 15:00 Plan for Today: United Kingdom (15)
Thursday 4 February | 18:30 Drifting Clouds (PG)
Saturday 6 March | 15:00 Chronicle of a Summer+Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? (12)
Supported by Film Hub North with National Lottery funding on behalf of the BFI Film Audience Network
In response to our exhibition Close to Home, the films in this season all circle ideas of community and solidarity and ask key questions about the limits of each.
£6 Full price / £4.50 Students, under 18s, unwaged and 65+
What makes a community? What brings people together and gives them common purpose? And just what is possible when that common purpose yields strength and resolve — to resist, to maintain, to survive?
Screenings rooted in stories of working-class lives, from across different countries and times, from Gateshead to Prague via Helsinki. They explore the most basic conditions of life – labour and housing – and the determination, integrity and compassion to fight the erosion of those conditions.
Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit) (15)
Thursday 5 November | 18:30
Dirs. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne Belgium / France 2014 / 95’
Oscar winner Marion Cotillard received another nomination for her searing, deeply felt performance as a working-class woman desperate to hold on to her factory job, in this gripping film from master Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Cotillard is Sandra, a wife and mother who suffers from depression and discovers that, while she was home on sick leave, a majority of her coworkers voted in favour of her being laid off over giving up their annual bonuses. She then spends a Saturday and Sunday visiting them each in turn, to try to convince them to change their minds. From this simple premise, the Dardennes create a powerfully humane drama about the importance of community in an increasingly impersonal world.
Panelstory, or How a Housing Development is Born (12)
Thursday 19 November | 18:30
Dir. Věra Chytilová Czechoslovakia / 1979 / 1hr 36mins
Life is a construction site for the tenants of the only partially finished prefab housing development in Prague. Between the buildings, young mothers struggle to push their prams through mounds of mud. And things are not any better inside.
Věra Chytilová’s film depicts one day in that construction chaos through the eyes of a handful of people of various ages who must deal with the hodgepodge of permanently makeshift solutions in what was conceived as a ‘garden city’.
In 2002, the director said: “It’s not a critical reaction to the regime; it’s more actually a view of human behaviour.” Nonetheless, her amusing social satire was held back by the authorities and not shown in Czechoslovakia until 1981. (Berlinale)
The Nothing Factory (adv 12)
Saturday 5 December | 14:30
Dir. Pedro Pinho Portugal / 2017 / 2hr 57mins
One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organise to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts with no work to do, as a form of retaliation, while negotiations over general lay-offs take place. The pressure leads to a breakdown of the workers along with the world around them.
Inspired by the true story of the Fataleva lift factory, which was run by its own employees for over 40 years following Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, between 1975 and 2016, The Nothing Factory relocates the collective takeover to the present, against a familiar backdrop of neoliberal decline which echoes other Portuguese films of the same time in subject and approach, especially Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy.
Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz: Close to Home
This landmark exhibition in Baltic’s Level 3 gallery marks the first time four major series by celebrated documentary photographer Tish Murtha will be shown together in the North East, alongside a newly commissioned body of work by Newcastle–based artist Kuba Ryniewicz.