Smokescreen: Double Feature - River of Grass (1994) & Heart of Darkness (1993)

Film 1: 2pm

River of Grass (1994)

They hang out in motels, seemingly unable to really be on the run, stuck in the Everglades and like so many people who talk about leaving but never do.

(The Florida Everglades is actually a slow moving river, 60 miles wide and over 100 miles long. It's called the River of Grass because of the way it looks. With sawgrass marshes – cypress swamps and mangrove forests, the 'glades is a spectacular sight.)

Film 2: 4pm

Heart of Darkness (1993)

From Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella of the same name. A trading company manager travels up an African river to find a missing outpost head and discovers the depth of evil in humanity's soul. In the late 1970's, Francis Ford Coppola used the Conrad story as a structural underpinning for his Vietnam movie, "Apocalypse Now." The novella's theme of alienation, greed, corruption and exploitation have struck some of this century's more dominant chords.

Tim Roth as Marlow is the narrator, describing a journey he makes for a Belgian trade company up the Congo River to find Kurtz, a former company agent suspected of hoarding vast quantities of ivory. With a crew of black workers, Marlow navigates the river through a series of work stations, each run by white men straining pitifully for the semblance of power that money from the ivory will bring them. All of their talk is of the mysterious Kurtz, who, depending on the speaker, is either insane or a prodigy, an illuminated man.