This film screened on Monday 22nd May 2017.

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ – so begins L.P. Hartley’s classic 1953 novel of innocence lost, an elegiac tone which Harold Pinter perfectly captured in his screenplay for Joseph Losey’s delicate adaptation, winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971.

The setting is 1900; young Leo Colston is the guest of his wealthy school friend Marcus at his family’s Norfolk home. Marcus falls ill with measles leaving Leo to befriend his beautiful older sister Marion (Julie Christie) and finds himself carrying messages between her and a tenant farmer neighbour, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates) with whom Marion is having an illicit affair.

This screening will be introduced by Sarah Glennie, Director of Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Notes by David O’Mahony