Big Screen Wonders Film Festival: Blade Runner

ArtYard’s Big Screen Wonders Film Festival is a series dedicated to films that demand a giant screen. The festival includes feature films and virtual Q&As with artists behind the films to engage the audience. The films will be screened on ArtYard’s two-story-tall film screen in the McDonnell Theater on Saturday evenings in January.

The festival is curated by Joshua Handler, founder and programmer of Picturehouse 441, a series featuring intimate virtual Q&As with various filmmakers and actors.

The first film is Blade Runner: The Final Cut, followed by a conversation with Handler and writer Hampton Fancher.

Upon its release in 1982, Blade Runner opened to mixed reviews and middling box office in a cut that wreaked of studio intervention. A decade later, Ridley Scott released a director’s cut that more closely aligned with his vision, and it was immediately hailed as a landmark work of cinema (this was followed by the 2007 final cut, Scott’s preferred version). A potent mix of film noir, science fiction, and dystopian drama, Blade Runner is an uncommonly intelligent work that asks major philosophical questions about what makes human beings human.

Blade Runner

Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples, Philip K. Dick
Stars: Harrison, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

Run Time: 1h 50m

A blade runner must pursue and terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.