A LAKE District cinema will be holding a special event to mark a seminal day in the cultural calendar.
The Royalty Cinema in Bowness will play host to a unique homecoming event three years in the planning when the award-winning drama 'The Windermere Children' will have a very rare outing on the big screen.
It will be shown in the Lake District on Thursday 26th January 2023 to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Entry is free and all are welcome.
There will be special features to accompany the screening, including short films and a Question and Answer session with Trevor Avery from Lake District Holocaust Project, who was an advisor on the film.
Set in the Lake District, the drama tells the story of the 300 child Holocaust Survivors who came to stay on Calgarth Estate and begin new lives in the summer of 1945.
'The Windermere Children' won the Prix Europa Award for Best Television 2020 at a ceremony in Berlin and has been broadcast worldwide since appearing in 2020.
The Royalty cinema is the very same picture house where the original Windermere Children watched films in 1945 when they came to the Lake District directly from liberation from the concentration camps.
A short film called ‘One Night from Prague’ by award-winning Windermere-based filmmaker Thomas Gardner before the screening will show scenes of the surviving children and their families visiting the Royalty cinema during a reunion in May 2022.
A recorded interview with Harry Olmer, one of the central figures of The Windermere Children film, sharing his reflections on the film and his time in the Lake District will also be shown.
Trevor Avery BEM, Director of Lake District Holocaust Project, says:
"This is a wonderful homecoming for me and The Windermere Children.
“It is about to have a very rare showing on a big screen courtesy of Wall to Wall, BBC, Fremantle and Warner Bros and the Royalty Bowness.
“The big screen experience draws you into the movie, especially when you consider that you will be watching it in the very same cinema the Jewish children used to watch films when they were here in 1945, and only a short distance from where they stayed at the time".
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