Nitram

  25th May 20:50 - Live at Cheltenham Playhouse

The opening moments of Nitram show archive footage of future mass-killer Martin Bryant as a child, telling a film crew that despite his injuries from playing with firecrackers, he will not stop doing it. What follows is a crawling build-up of dread, as the events of this feature, based on reality, get closer to events in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in April 1996, when he shot 35 people dead and wounded 23 more. Caleb Landry Jones’s performance as Bryant won him Best Actor at Cannes. Randy Myers, in the San Jose Mercury News, called it ‘astonishing in every second’. Directed by Justic Kurzel, from a screenplay by Shaun Grant, Nitram is a strange prelude to unfathomable violence. As a character study, it does not offer reassuring answers, but it uses its unsettling power to highlight the necessity for political change.