Mother Joan of the Angels

Before THE DEVILS. there was MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS! A landmark of Polish cinema, this celebrated film is based on the documented story of the `demonic possession’ of a group of nuns that led to the burning of a priest at the stake in Loudun, France in 1634 (also the basis for Ken Russell’s notorious 1971 film The Devils). Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels is a spare, visually astonishing and profoundly disturbing exploration of faith, repression, fanaticism and sexuality. Aided by an extraordinary performance by Lucyna Winnicka as Mother Joan, Kawalerowicz produces one of cinema’s most evocative and intense studies of the tragedy of emotion repressed by dogma.