Russell Hobbs British Film Festival Special Event: The History of Sound

Enjoy a G&T or mocktail on arrival before these special 2025 Russell Hobbs British Film Festival Premiere screenings of The History of Sound, starring Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor deliver luminous performances in this sweeping, elegiac romance set against the backdrop of early twentieth-century America. Adapted from Ben Shattuck’s celebrated short story, the film follows Lionel (Mescal), a gifted farm-boy with synesthesia (a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers), and David (O’Connor), a fellow music student he meets at the New England Conservatory in 1917. Their connection deepens through a shared devotion to folk music, yet the onset of World War I pulls them apart with David sent to the front lines and Lionel back to Kentucky.

Reunited after the war, the pair embark on a journey through rural Maine, capturing voices and songs on fragile wax cylinders, preserving a vanishing cultural heritage even as their own lives diverge.

Crafted with breathtaking restraint, Oliver Hermanus’ film of quiet textures and haunting silences, sees landscapes echo memory and sound itself becomes a vessel of longing. The History of Sound is both an intimate love story and cultural elegy, a tender meditation on music, memory, and the ways love endures through loss.

EVENT DETAILS:
November 12 & 13 | Check the sidebar for specific event times.