Rural Cinema - H is for Hawk

Claire Foy takes on Helen Macdonald's goshawk memoir

Cirencester has no cinema of its own, so the Corinium Museum turns its galleries over to a big screen once a month for its Rural Cinema afternoons. This one is close to a genuine premiere: the film adaptation of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, which played the Telluride Film Festival before reaching UK audiences.

Claire Foy plays Macdonald, who responds to her father's sudden death by training a goshawk named Mabel, one of the more notoriously difficult birds of prey to tame. Brendan Gleeson co-stars, Philippa Lowthorpe directs, and the script comes from Emma Donoghue, the novelist behind Room. The book took almost a decade to reach the screen after Lena Headey first optioned it back in 2015.

Macdonald's memoir also threads in the story of T.H. White, the Sword in the Stone author who tried and largely failed to train a goshawk of his own decades earlier, and that second strand is part of why the book was considered hard to adapt.

A quiet Saturday afternoon with a film ten years in the making is worth the detour into the museum.

Saturday 26 September 2026 · Corinium Museum, Park Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 2BX · Starts 2pm