ANCHORESS
1993 · dir. Chris Newby · 108 min
- Digital
- 15
- Repertory
In a remote fourteenth-century English village, teenage Christine Carpenter believes she has received a vision of the Virgin Mary. Rather than accept an arranged marriage, she chooses to be sealed inside a tiny cell adjoining the church, becoming the community’s anchoress. Her apparent spiritual authority soon brings her into conflict with a priest determined to control her visions, while suspicion gathers around her mother, a midwife whose knowledge is branded as witchcraft. Shot in stark, luminous black and white, Chris Newby’s extraordinary debut turns a recorded fragment of medieval history into a fierce study of faith, confinement and female resistance. Austere without feeling remote, Anchoress finds sensuality and rebellion inside the narrowest imaginable space: a haunting film about who gets to interpret divine experience, and what happens when a young woman claims that power for herself.