Selected and introduced by BAM/PFA's new Senior Curator of Film Susan Oxtoby, who recently joined us from Cinematheque Ontario, this program offers the audience a chance to share a film Susan treasures, and gives her the opportunity to introduce the acclaimed Montreal musician Gabriel Thibaudeau.

(Zemlya). The poetic lyricism of Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth makes it one of the great works of cinema, using the emotional power of the image to express the director's love for his homeland. The film is a portrait of a Ukrainian village, and the plot line is quite simple: an old man dies, the local collective buys a tractor, and the young farm chairman is gunned down by a kulak. These dramatic moments underpin Dovzhenko's hymn to a people and their relationship to the land. Painterly wide-angle shots of vast wheat fields blowing in the wind are framed such that the land is the dominant element; other compositions are four-fifths sky. Sunflowers in full bloom, apple trees heavy with fruit-these serene vistas are juxtaposed with montage sequences of villagers in close-up in an enduring expression of the cyclical nature of life.

I am delighted to welcome Gabriel Thibaudeau, who will perform piano accompaniment to this glorious 35mm archival print provided courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise, where he is the official composer and pianist for silent film presentations.