Film
Electric Shadows: The Mission
- Director
- Roland Joffe
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 125 mins
This prestige 1986 Britflick from producer David Puttnam and director Roland Joffe is set in Latin America in the 1750s. Jeremy Irons is the Jesuit priest setting up a mission to convert the Indians while protecting them from the depredations of slave traders like Robert De Niro (who later sees the error of his ways and applies to join the Society of Jesus). Meanwhile, politicking between the Church and the Spanish and Portuguese colonial authorities threatens the mission’s future. Patronising and simplistic portrayal of the Indians aside, this is a spectacular piece of mainstream filmmaking. Few punters went to see it, leading to the collapse of Goldcrest Films, but The Mission won the seal of approval from both The Vatican and the Church Times.
It’s back on screen in the Cathedral’s new monthly Electric Shadows series of films deemed to have a “theological aspect”. This one’s introduced by Dr. David Leech, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at the University of Bristol
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
