We’re showing three films on Sunday at the BCT: Meru at 2:30, Free Solo at 4:45, and The Handmaid’s Tale at 7:15. Single movie tickets ($8) and All-Day-Passes ($15) can be purchased here. (Ticket prices will increase the day of the show.)
In the high-stakes pursuit of big-wall climbing, the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru may be the ultimate prize. Sitting 21,000 feet above the sacred Ganges River in Northern India, the mountain’s perversely stacked obstacles make it both a nightmare and an irresistible calling for some of the world’s toughest climbers. In October 2008, renowned alpinists Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk arrived in India to tackle Meru. Their planned seven-day trip quickly devolved into a 20-day odyssey in sub-zero temperatures with quickly depleting food rations. Within 100 meters of the elusive summit, their journey – like all previous attempts – fell short of the goal.
Heartbroken and defeated, the trio returned to their everyday lives, where the siren song of Meru continued to beckon. By September 2011, Anker had convinced his team to reunite and undertake the Shark’s Fin once more, under even more extraordinary circumstances. MERU is the story of that journey, an expedition through nature’s harshest elements and one’s complicated inner demons, and ultimately on to impossible new heights.
Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo)
2015 / 100 min
2019 Academy Award Nominee: Best Documentary Feature … A stunning, intimate and unflinching portrait of the free soloist climber Alex Honnold, as he prepares to achieve his lifelong dream: climbing the face of the world’s most famous rock…the 3,000ft El Capitan in Yosemite National Park…without a rope.
Directors: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin
Runtime:100 min / presented in part by IU Outdoor Adventures
Critic’s Pick! Alex Honnold’s Free Solo climb should be celebrated as one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever…. A miraculous opportunity for the rest of us to experience what you might call the human sublime -The NY Times
Before the 2017 television series, there was the 1990 movie. Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway star in the original film, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel about religious tyranny and sexual slavery. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), from a screenplay by English playwright Harold Pinter. Aiden Quinn and Robert DuVall co-star.
In the near future, war rages across the Republic of Gilead—formerly the United States of America—and pollution has rendered 99% of the population sterile. Captured (and separated from her daughter) while attempting to cross the Canadian border, Kate is relocated to a facility where she is trained to become a Handmaid — a concubine for one of the privileged but barren couples who rule over Gilead’s religious fundamentalist regime. (108 min)