Thirty years of Purbeck Film Festival

IT is hard to believe it is 30 years since the first Purbeck Film Festival, but in those three decades the rural celebration of film has become one of the country’s most interesting and varied events, this year running from 16th October to 1st November, with an astonishing mix of classic, recent and new releases.

The programme cover’s striking image (pictured) is a still from Whispers in the Woods, a 2025 French wildlife documentary.

The festival opens with a screening of Tina, an acclaimed 2024 New Zealand film about a Samoan woman who founds a quake in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake.

Other recent films include Tuner, The Christophers, Wuthering Heights, Hen, Hamnet, and Fjord, the Romanian-Norwegian winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.

There is a celebration of Jacques Tati, with guest speaker Rowan Atkinson, and other classic movies include Sone Like It Hot, Dr Zhivago, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) and The English Patient.

The brand new releases include the 2026 Sense and Sensibility, and Wicker, a folk-horror film, being shown on its opening day. It is complemented by another classic of the folk horror genre, The Wicker Man.