Wild Nights With Emily

Madeleine Olnek / USA / Comedy History / 2018 / 84m / PG-13

Featuring: Molly Shannon, Amy Seimetz, Susan Ziegler, Brett Gelman

Two screenings

FRIDAY OCTOBER 4

7 + 8:45PM

In the mid-19th century, Emily Dickinson is writing prolifically, baking gingerbread, and enjoying a passionate, lifelong romantic relationship with another woman, her friend and sister-in-law Susan...yes this is the iconic American poet, popularly thought to have been a recluse.

Beloved comic Molly Shannon leads in this humorous yet bold reappraisal of Dickinson, informed by her private letters.

While seeking publication of some of the 1,775 poems written during her lifetime, Emily (Shannon) finds herself facing a troupe of male literary gatekeepers too confused by her genius to take her work seriously.

Instead her work attracts the attention of an ambitious woman editor, who also sees Emily as a convenient cover for her own role in buttoned-up Amherst's most bizarre love triangle.

A timely critique of how women's history is rewritten, Wild Nights With Emily remains vibrant, irreverent and tender--a perhaps closer depiction of Emily Dickinson's real life than anything seen before.

”It took a woman writer-director, working with a woman historian, Martha Nell Smith, to tell the true story. “Dickinson was a queer hero,” Shannon said in a phone interview, “a rebel, a trailblazer, a hungry, aggressive poet, fighting her times.” - Globe and Mail