Brazil

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"Brazil for us, represents a relevant and surreal look at a dystopian future where bureaucratic architecture of systems and power structures are distorted and challenged." - The Young Electrics film programmers group

In the future, a clerk at the all-powerful Ministry of Information sticks to his ideals and ends up crushed by the system in this half comedy, half horror story from former 'Monty Python' animator Terry Gilliam. Like Orwell's novel '1984', which it echoes, the future is seen from a 1940s perspective. Jonathan Pryce stars, with Robert De Niro making a cameo appearance as an excessively diligent sewage inspector.

If Franz Kafka had been an animator, film director and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus - Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It's not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets squashed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant.

This film presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself - until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it.

The Young Electrics Present the full director's cut.

A message from our cinema director, Rebecca Marshall:
As we have been unable to operate at our previous full capacity since reopening, and with safety measures unlikely to be able to relax anytime this year, we are facing mounting building rental costs, film licensing costs and other overheads that were previously viable when we were open at full capacity.

Unless all our current season of films sell out, the cinema will be unable to continue into 2021 and will likely close.

With this in mind I make this plea to all to help sustain this much-loved community asset:

How you can help:

• Book a ticket to a screening, soon! And bring a friend.
• Become an official Friend of the Electric Palace
• Hire the cinema for a private party
• Buy a gift voucher
• Donate to the cinema
• Support us on social media by sharing our posts and events

Thank you.