A traditional day of festivities throughout the centuries, May Day celebrates springtime fertility and revelry with village fetes and community gatherings. At the Clinton Street Theater we won’t be dancing around the Maypole, but we are bringing some of the best features from the 2015 Rural Route Film Festival, along with a program of the Best Shorts.
The Rural Route Film Festival was created to highlight works that deal with unique people and places outside of the bustle of the city. Taking in a Rural Route program is like choosing the road less travelled, and learning something new about our constantly amazing world. Whether it be a fictional backpacking drama set in the Peruvian Andes, a personal/experimental work about life in a Kazakh village, or a documentary about an organic, Appalachian turnip farm, our mission is to screen work about rare people and cultures normally overlooked by the mainstream media. Our content consists of top quality, cutting edge contemporary and archival work from sources both local and far, far away.
THE WICKER MAN
Director: Robin Hardy
Country: UK
Year: 1973
Runtime: 88 minutes
This is it – the new, beautifully-restored, critically-acclaimed cult classic, re-cut again to the director’s final approval. The Wicker Man is the tale of a pious (virgin) police sergeant who travels to a remote Scottish Isle in search of a missing girl and discovers an entire community that has embraced a sexually uninhibited pagan lifestyle, centered around the worship of nature.
The film originally arrived in 1973, at a juncture in time where many in the counter-culture movement had left traditional Christian-based religions for alternatives like the Church of Satan, the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishna movement, and cults like The People’s Temple (which would tragically end with the Jonestown massacre in 1978). You also had the “free love” movement, and a return to nature with the rise of communes and celebration of the first Earth Day (1970). With this in mind, it is not surprising that screenwriter Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth, Frenzy), would choose to write a ‘horror’ story tied to pagan religion, with a core worship of nature/earth and sex/fertility/birth, as it relates to both ancient British May Day traditions and what was occurring in contemporary popular culture. It is this combination that lends a credible air to the film, ultimately making it that much more unsettling.
More
Less
