Admission $3.50

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, A Touch of Zen is a masterful martial arts film that is equally thrilling for its surreal visual beauty. The story, set in the Ming dynasty, involves a young scribe who befriends a woman living in an abandoned, and seemingly haunted, fortress on the edge of town. The mysterious beauty reveals that she is in fact hiding from the secret police, who have tortured and murdered her father. The weak-willed young man displays nerves of steel when faced with a band of vicious Ming police. London critic Alexander Walker writes, “It folds its violent story into a landscape of ultra-poetic refinement where the camera takes as much aesthetic pleasure in the quiver of a birch branch as King Hu does in bringing the Zen philosophy of ‘mind over matter' to bear on the physical encounters....”