Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Mumbai, in association with Film Heritage Foundation, the French Institute in India and the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, presents Michelangelo Antonioni’s spellbinding Italian film ‘Red Desert’ (1964) at a special one-time screening, as a part of Reel Europa, a unique international collaboration for a quarterly showcase of the best of restored classic cinema from Italy, France and Germany.
Michelangelo Antonioni is considered one of cinema’s leading aesthetes. Under his direction film became a metaphor for human experience rather than a record of it. Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age, about a disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti, wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins and tentatively flirting with her husband’s co-worker, played by Richard Harris, continues to keep viewers spellbound. With one startling, painterly composition after another of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships, Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.
25 September 2025 | Regal Cinema | 6.30 pm
Free entry
The film has English subtitles.