What's On
Shepherds
Mathyas quits his marketing job in Montreal and goes to France with the romantic notion of becoming a shepherd. He's in for a rude awakening... Based on a true story, Deraspe's stirring film plays spiritual uplift off against some 3000 sheep and a donkey.
The Ascent
During the darkest winter of WWII, two Soviet partisans venture through the backwoods of Belarus in search of food, always at risk of falling into enemy hands. In her masterpiece Larisa Shepitko zeroes in on profound spiritual and philosophical themes.
Our Lady of the Nile
Veronica and Virginia are inseparable friends at an elite Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Nile, but what binds them together is the very thing that separates them forever. We are in Rwanda, 1973, and tribal tensions are simmering ominously.
Bicycle Thieves
De Sica's film about a labourer desperate to track down the bike that has been stolen from him is a landmark in film history, the movie that cemented the impact of Italian neo-realism on world cinema.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
RW Fassbinder's lop-sided love story (60 year old German widow and a Moroccan twenty years her junior) shines an unflattering light on social hypocrisies.
The Cloud-Capped Star
Ritwik Ghatak is the unsung genius of Bengali cinema. His best known film is a a brilliantly structured melodrama about the terrible demands of poverty and family on the prospects of a young woman.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.
Woman in the Dunes (35mm)
Teshigahara's collaboration with novelist Kōbō Abe's is vividly strange, erotic and unsettling allegory about an amateur entymologist who is himself ensnared in a trap he only dimly understands.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.