FilmClub’s first season at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg is underway and tomorrow (Tuesday, September 9) they will screen one of the most important and popular European films of the 1990s, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue.

In 2002 Nick James, editor of the influential British journal Sight and Sound, suggested to his readers that Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue, should be considered among the top ten films of all time.

The first of what became known as the Three Colours trilogy, Blue corresponds to the first hue of the French tricoleur and also to Liberté, the first of the three revolutionary ideals that the French hold so dear.

The colour and the concept of freedom provide thematic and aesthetic departure points, from which Kieslowski goes on to examine the impact on Julie, (played by Juliette Binoche) of the devastating deaths in a car crash of her composer husband and young daughter.

An extraordinarily sensitive and intimate portrayal of grief and recovery, the film is at the same time a rich and complex examination of the role of coincidence and chance in life.

As the film director Stanley Kubrick said of Kieslowski, he has the “very rare ability to dramatize ideas rather than just talk about them. By making his points through the dramatic action of the story he gains the added power of allowing the audience to discover what’s really going on, rather than being told. He does this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realise until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.”

Entry is R35 and the Tatham Coffee shop will be offering a soup and bread supper from 6 pm onwards (at a very reasonable R30 per person). Safe parking will be available in the parking lot next to the gallery in Chief Albert Luthuli Street, Pietermaritzburg.