Film
The Piano (15) at Tinside Lido
Standard Tickets £9 (we will provide a chair for everyone)
VIP Tickets £17 (package includes a chair in the VIP area, blanket, packet of Portlebay Popcorn and a glass of prosecco)
Online sales for this event are now closed. Standard or VIP tickets can be purchased at the doors tonight from 8pm. Please note we will only accept cash payments.
Jane Campion became the first female director to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano, her extraordinary, triumphant masterpiece about a mute woman’s rebellion in a newly colonised, Victorian-era New Zealand. Sound tracked by Michael Nyman’s evocative score, it won Oscars for Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin in career-defining roles and Best Screenplay for Campion’s typically individualistic, female-centric script. We are delighted to be screening this re-release in the film’s 25th anniversary year. Hunter gives a majestic silent performance as Ada McGrath, the mute Scotswoman who arrives with her strong-willed young daughter Flora (Paquin) and her grand piano in the New Zealand wilderness.
She is to marry frontiersman Alistair Stewart (Sam Neill), having been sold him by her father, but takes an immediate dislike to him after he refuses to carry her beloved piano home with them, instead selling it to his overseer George Baines (Harvey Keitel). Attracted to Ada, Baines agrees to return the piano in exchange for lessons that gradually become a series of erotically charged sexual encounters. As the story unfolds like a Greek tragedy, all of the characters’ long suppressed emotions come to the fore, as if elicited by the wildness of the natural world around them.
Dir. Jane Campion, New Zealand, 1993, 120 mins.
Cast. Holly Hunter, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill.