Belfast Film Festival: The Bookshop 
Directed by Isabel Coixet and starring Bill Nighy and Emily Mortimer. A woman in a small town in 1959 England decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. By exposing the locals to cutting-edge literature of the day such as Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’, she sows the seeds of an awakening in the conservative town.
The Bookshop is a sumptuous cinematic adaptation which celebrates Bibliophilia itself. Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s celebrated novel of 1978, and set in a sleepy 1950’s English town, The Bookshop tells the story of Florence Green’s attempt to re-energise an out of touch, morally somnambulant rural townsfolk through the dissemination of some of the most stirring literature of the day. Leaving grief and a dead husband in the past, Florence takes life into her own hands by opening a bookshop in Hardborough, a quiet Anglian town, and one sheltered from the social and sexual revolutions taking place in the far away urban centers.
