The Cinematheque

“The Piano demands as much a physical and emotional response as an intellectual one … Like Ada’s piano music, which is described as ​‘a mood that passes through you, a sound that creeps into you,’ this is cinema that fills every sense.”

Lizzie Francke, Sight and Sound

Jane Campion parlayed a Palme d’Or win into improbable mainstream success with The Piano, her masterful third feature and still most recognizable work. Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin, both remarkable in Oscar-winning roles, are Scottish mother and daughter Ada and Flora, bound tightly to each other as they arrive on the windswept shores of colonial New Zealand in the mid-19th century. Ada, betrothed to a Kiwi landowner (Sam Neill, RIP), is mute but hardly silent, her voice given expression through Flora, interpreting her signs, and a beloved piano, conduit for her soul. The cruel sale of the instrument to Baines (Harvey Keitel), a Māori-assimilated frontiersman, precipitates a barter for Ada to reclaim it—for each black key, a desire to be met. A sensual, Brontëan tale of passion and fury that, underpinned by Michael Nyman’s evocative score, assumes the grandeur of myth, The Piano established Campion as a world-class director, Oscar-winning screenwriter, and the foremost female auteur of the 1990s.

In English, Māori, and blended sign language with English subtitles

“A tonic for the tired soul … [The Piano] offers a complete way of seeing, an uncompromised view of the world by a writer-director whose command of the visual and emotional aspects of filmmaking is fearless and profound.”

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“Achingly beautiful … The Piano remains a remarkable and poignant meditation on female power disguised as a love story for the ages.”

Hannah Strong, Little White Lies