Portrait of a Lady on Fire // Year of Love

(We will sell up to 35 tickets pre-sale, and we will have about 10 additional tickets at the door for walk-ins)

Dir. Céline Sciamma - 2019 - 2h2m

Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.

YEAR OF LOVE (a new Stray Cat series):

In 2024, we are falling in love with a lineup of the best romance films. Beginning on Valentine's Day, we will screen one film per month about love. Tales of heartbreak, screwball comedies, basketball, campy classics, and sensuous period dramas are bound to get your heart stirring in what is destined to be our most romantic year yet.

Host or Publisher Stray Cat Film Center