An Oscar winning film-maker will host a question and answer session following a screening of one of his films tomorrow night (July 13).

Michaël Dudok de Wit will be at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley for a special screening of 2016's The Red Turtle, which he both directed and co-wrote.

The film is an award-winning French and Japanese animated fantasy drama. It is the first co-production from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese film company many will know for producing the anime film Spirited Away. They worked with French company Wild Bunch.  The Red Turtle is a mature, silent film about a man getting to grips with life on a desert island. A man is shipwrecked on a beautiful island devoid of humans and must make the most of what he has to survive. Watched on by a group of sand crabs, he attempts to escape but is thwarted by the weather and a red turtle with a vendetta. Then an unexpected visitor arrives who will alter the man’s fate for all time.

The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Un Certain Regard Special Prize which commends films made from an unusual point of view and seeks to encourage innovative filmmaking.

Also coming up this week at the Phoenix Cinema…

The Beguiled (15)

Adapted by acclaimed writer and director Sofia Coppola, who recently won Best Director at Cannes Film Festival.

From Thomas Cullinan’s novel of the same name, The Beguiled unfolds in a girls’ school in the state of Virginia in 1864. As the Civil War rages, The Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies has been sheltered from the outside world - until the day a wounded Union soldier is discovered nearby and taken in.

As they provide refuge and tend to his wounds, the house is taken over with sexual tension and dangerous rivalries, and taboos are broken in an unexpected turn of events.

Friday, July 14 until Thursday, July 20.

Chicken Run (U)

When a cockerel apparently flies into a chicken farm, the chickens see him as an opportunity to escape their evil owners.

Saturday, July 15, 12pm.  

Toddler Time (U)

Every Tuesday at 11am they screen a 30 minute film or series of shorts that have been specially selected for little ones. This week it’s Everything’s Rosie. There is also a fun activity and chance to meet other parents and carers before the screening at 10.30am. For ages two to four.

Tuesday, July 18, 10.30am or 11am film start.

Yentil (PG)

In this 1983 film directed by Barbara Streisand, Rebbe Mendel is a single father who teaches the Talmud, a sacred text of Judaism, to the boys of his small Polish town. Behind closed doors, he also instructs his daughter, Yentl, despite the fact that girls are forbidden to study religious scripture.

When Yentl's father dies, she still has a strong desire to learn about her faith - so she disguises herself as a male, enrolls in a religious school, and unexpectedly finds love along the way.

Tuesday, July 18, 12pm.

NT LIVE: Angels In America - Part One: Millennium Approaches (15)

Live from the National Theatre in London’s Southbank, it is America in the mid-1980s. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and a conservative Reagan administration, New Yorkers grapple with life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell.

Andrew Garfield (Silence, Hacksaw Ridge) plays Prior Walter along with a cast including Denise Gough (People, Places and Things) as Harper Pitt, Nathan Lane (The Producers) as Roy Cohn, James McArdle (Star Wars: The Force Awakens)as Louis Ironson and Russell Tovey (The Pass)as Joe Pitt.

This new staging of Tony Kushner’s multi-award winning two-part play is directed by Olivier and Tony award winning director Marianne Elliott (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and War Horse).

Thursday, July 20, 7pm.

Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley, N2 9PJ. Details: 020 8444 6789