Patty Hearst on 35mm with Paul Schrader

Patty Hearst
1988, 108 min, 35mm

Screen Slate is pleased to present a 35mm screening of Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst (1988), featuring Schrader in attendance for a live Q&A with Anthology Film Archives archivist John Klacsmann. This special one-time screening takes place on Hearst’s 70th birthday, which also falls just two weeks after the 50th anniversary of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Based on Heart’s autobiography Every Secret Thing, the film stars Natasha Richardson in a tour de force performance as the young heiress, whose abduction and purported brainwashing by left-wing guerillas became the subject of intense media speculation. In Schrader’s hands, nightmarish formalism that portrays the fear and confusion of her early months in captivity give way to an uneasy road movie as Hearst, rechristened by her captors as “Tania,” participates in crimes and eventually goes out on the lam.