This film was released on Friday 13th March 2015 and is no longer screening.

EXCLUSIVELY AT IFI

Dorset in the 19th century, and Bathsheba Everdene is an attractive, fiercely independent woman at odds with the age. Having inherited a large farm which she struggles to manage, Bathsheba attracts the attention of three very different men. Toying with their emotions, and determined only to marry who and when she chooses, it is when Bathsheba gives in to passion that tragedy strikes.

Faithfully adapted from Thomas Hardy’s epic love story, Far from the Madding Crowd is a key British film of the 1960s and was John Schlesinger’s most ambitious project before leaving the U.K. for America and Midnight Cowboy (1969). It remains an engrossing spectacle, with iconic, stirring performances by Julie Christie and Terence Stamp giving the film great emotional resonance. The brutal beauty of the Dorset landscape is captured evocatively by Schlesinger and his cinematographer Nicolas Roeg. (Notes by Michael Hayden.)

★★★★★ The Guardian

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