Red Road
Contemporary Masters • 2h 3m
Andrea Arnold • UK • 2006 • Jackie notices a man from her past monitoring CCTV cameras.
Jackie lives alone, monitoring CCTV cameras in a high-rise housing complex in Glasgow's northern periphery. She engages from time to time in an affair with a married man, but her life is otherwise uneventful. Then one day a figure appears on Jackie's monitor that she's seen before; she learns this man, Clyde, has been recently released from prison on parole. Before long Jackie begins stalking Clyde, entangling herself in a perilous web of past histories and traumas.
Tense, elusive, and steeped in an atmosphere of escalating paranoia, Red Road delves into the psychology of a woman with an unresolved past as a conduit to our contemporary surveillance age. Andrea Arnold's first film premiered at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize; Göteborg, where it won the International Debut Award; and Reykjavik, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize.
Essay: Surveillance and the High-Rise in Red Road
Up Next in Contemporary Masters
-
Russian Ark
Aleksandr Sokurov • 2002 • Russia • A floating, single-take journey through Russian history.
Filmed in one 96-minute, continuous single-take shot—the first work of cinema to ever do so—Russian Ark foregrounds the ...
-
Sacro GRA
Gianfranco Rosi • 2013 • Italy
A cartography of Rome's ring road and its eccentric inhabitants.
The Grande Raccordo Anulare is a 68-kilometer highway girdling the metropolis of Rome. Rarely given a passing glimps...
-
Silent Light
Carlos Reygadas • 2007 • Mexico • Filmed with nonprofessional actors among a community of Mennonites.
Johan lives with Esther, his wife, and their seven children in rural Chihuahua state, among a community of Men...