NYAB Event - Lech Majewski "The Mill & The Cross"

Lech Majewski "The Mill & The Cross"

Film Forum

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THE MILL & THE CROSS is a visually stunning cinematic exploration of Pieter Bruegel’s epic masterpiece, The Way to Calvary, presented through the eyes of director Lech Majewski, one of today’s most adventurous and inspired artists. With a fantastically talented cast, including Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling, and Michael York, as well an enormously complex and imaginative digital tapestry, Majewski takes the audience through Bruegel’s depiction of the story of Christ’s Passion, set in Flanders under brutal Spanish occupation in the year 1564.

From the more than five hundred figures that fill Bruegel’s canvas, THE MILL & THE CROSS focuses on a dozen characters whose life stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped horsemen. We are invited to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch Bruegel himself (Hauer) at work on his canvas, with the commentary of Nicholas Jonghelinck (York), his friend and art collector, and the Virgin Mary (Rampling). Majewski’s captivating visual effects, combining live actors with location footage and striking painted backdrops, create layer upon layer with which to explore and expand upon the narrative in Bruegel’s work.

In 2006, Majewski was honored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a major retrospective of his works, entitled “Lech Majewski: Conjuring the Moving Image.”