The film

Set in the heart of French Cathar Country, A Change in the Weather is the latest work from director Jon Sanders (Back to the Garden, Painted Angels), featuring longtime collaborators Anna Mottram and Bob Goody alongside celebrated German actress and singer, Meret Becker and featuring a screen debut from Nottingham playwright, Stephen Lowe.

In an attempt to revisit a creative collaboration and revive his marriage, a theatre director brings together a group of performers to spend a week with him and his wife in an isolated, mountainous part of southern France. As the work progresses, fiction and reality become blurred and there is a constant tension between the characters' own lives and the nature of the work - an investigation into the changing nature of love. The couple are haunted by memories and dreams which, in the end, threaten not only the venture but the marriage itself. All this is underpinned by a sense of melancholy, reflected in the songs and music performed, and in the dramatic and implacably beautiful landscape.

A Change in the Weather will be released in on 7th July, 2017 by Verve Pictures.

Jon Sanders - director, co-writer

Jon Sanders was born in Kent. After Cambridge University he studied film at the Slade School of Art under Thorold Dickinson. He has had a long and distinguished career in the film industry, working as an editor, sound recordist (From Mao to Mozart, Oscar winning film about Isaac Stern’s tour of China), documentary maker (Then When the World Changed, co-directed with cameraman, Roger Deakins) and writer/director. His collaboration with the artist Lucia Noguiera Smoke (7 mins) 1996 is now part of the Tate Collection. His first feature film, Painted Angels (106 mins), starring Kelly McGillis and Brenda Fricker, which was about prostitution in the Wild West, premièred at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was released in the UK in 1999 by Artificial Eye. His second feature film Low Tide (86 mins) premiered at Curzon Soho in January 2008 and in 2012 Late September was released at the ICA London and independent screens around the country before being released on DVD by Verve Pictures.

Back to the Garden

"Jon Sanders returns with another valuable, serious example of high-minded, low-budget British ensemble drama..... delicate, sober and thoughtful"
Peter Bradshaw THE GUARDIAN
"There are dappled shades of Joanna Hogg, with less formal determination, in elegiac British ensemble drama Back to the Garden ..."
Guy Lodge THE OBSERVER
"Jon Sanders’ bittersweet improv drama carries a calm power that slowly surfaces through long, open takes"
EMPIRE

Late September

"British director Jon Sanders, working within a budget that wouldn’t pay for a second-rate Hollywood star’s caravan, is following in the footsteps of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu… Not without humour, full of irony and with a real feeling for disjointed lives"
★★★★ Derek Malcolm EVENING STANDARD
"Pent-up emotions, sadness and congealed love are magnificently and subtly conveyed by a cast of obviously great experience...... "
★★★★ Jason Solomons MAIL ON SUNDAY
"Jon Sanders’ spellbinding Late September......the best kind of magic here, the kind that comes from a seemingly empty hat."
★★★★ Nigel Andrews FINANCIAL TIMES

Low Tide

"A small film about life and death that hits home more than most self-important big ones."
★★★★ Derek Malcolm
"Low Tide is a micro-budget drama about the last days of a terminally ill middle-aged woman. Distinguished by an elegant, very English sense of formal restraint but raging with raw, heartfelt emotion, the film is remarkably moving, sometimes unbearably so. It's well worth seeing."
Time Out
"Low Tide offers a radical template for a revived British auteur cinema."
Vertigo Magazine
"One of the best, if not the best, no budget films I have ever seen."
Jim Stark

Painted Angels