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Starting this October, at Cine Club we’re celebrating the weird, offbeat and slightly strange worlds that cinema can create in our season Elastic Reality. This is a selection of films that aren’t completely detached from our world, but are clearly adrift from our own reality in some way. The things we understand to be rules of our world are bent, pulled and stretched into shapes sometimes scary, sometimes thrilling, sometimes heartfelt. Something is wrong with these worlds. Do you wish to dive deeper and face the consequences, whatever they may be?

Thursday 29 October

At the start of 2025, David Lynch passed away, leaving a colossal hole in Hollywood where his genius used to be. He was a giant figure in the film industry, and one whose passing we still feel today, almost two years later. From his very first film, it’s clear why he became a legend, because even almost fifty years later, there is nothing quite like Eraserhead.

What begins as a simple tale of a man being forced to raise a child he unknowingly fathered twists into an industrial nightmarescape about parental anxiety full of bizarre special effects. Wherever you are in your journey with David Lynch, be it long time obsessive or curious newbie, Eraserhead remains an essential surrealist masterpiece that you have to see in the cinema on a cold autumnal evening.

Thursday 19 November

Director Lee Chang-Dong is back in cinemas with his new film Possible Love, but you may have missed his previous film from 2018, Burning. Before you even learn the logline the film disorients you, being a South Korean movie based on a short story by a Japanese author and starring an American actor. It’s based on a Haruki Murakami short story, and is a brilliant translation of his wandering and mysterious prose into film. The film follows a listless young man who meets an old school friend, and when she goes travelling she asks him to look after her cat. However, on getting to her house, he can not find her cat. That is just one of many mysteries the film is spinning at any one time, a veritable feast of Schrodinger-esque mysteries in which the answer to any puzzle is at once all answers and no answers. Those looking for a neat denouement need not apply, but fans of mystery for the sake of mystery will be very well fed.

Thursday 17 December

When you think about the concept of the greatest films of all time, there is a certain blueprint that comes to mind. They’re often very technically impressive, very masculine and almost always very long. In Petite Maman, I think we find the perfect balm, a film I truly believe to be one of the best of all time but that is misleadingly minimal, unmistakably feminine and very short. The film is from Céline Sciamma, best known for writing and directing Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and this was her follow-up. Created during the pandemic, it’s the story of a young girl who, while wandering the woods outside the house owned by her recently deceased grandmother, discovers another girl who looks just like her. This girl, it turns out, is the younger version of her own mother. The set-up sounds like the stuff of sci-fi, but it couldn’t be gentler in execution, you’re not really sure if something literal or metaphorical is going on, but nor does it matter. All that matters is the emotional wrecking ball that this film becomes, bringing me to tears constantly in its runtime. The beauty is, it isn’t even because the film is terribly sad, it’s because of the overwhelming beauty of the whole thing. It’s magically sincere, feeling like it is told completely through the eyes of its young characters and not just about them. It does all of this, in a running time of 72 minutes. Even if you don’t believe it’s as essential as I do, how could you not take the chance on that?

Towner Cine Club is a chance for you to catch classic films back on the big screen, all presented with an introduction by Henry Jordan. Whether it’s arthouse oddities, cult classics, old favourites or new discoveries, we’ll be showing something exciting every month at Towner Cinema.

For previous introductions from our first year of screenings, you can find those here: https://quitenerdyblog.substack.com/

And for further updates about these screenings and others, follow us on Instagram at cineclubeastbourne

Henry Jordan works at Towner as a Duty Manager and helps with the day-to-day operations of the cinema, as well as hosting Towner Cine Club. He studied English and Film Studies at University of Exeter, which included a study abroad year that he took at University of South Florida in Tampa, USA. During Henry’s time at university, he discovered his core fields of interest, among them para-cinema, surrealism and anti-literature.Before Towner, Henry worked at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, where he was a regular host for their sell out quiz nights and hosted a Q&A with Dame Pippa Harris for her film Empire of Light. He also was a regular on the Cambridge Film Show, has been published in The Quietus and still writes for The Quite Nerdy Blog, his blog about pop culture that has been running since 2014.