The Annihilation of Fish

Tender romantic comedy about love blossoming between two elderly eccentrics. For many years, Charles Burnett’s deeply human film was hardly screened – before being rediscovered as a lost jewel of American independent cinema. Jamaican widower Fish (James Earl Jones) suffers from delusions, and has spent his whole life in a psychiatric institution. When his extreme behaviour leads to him being expelled, he rents a room from a landlady in Los Angeles and meets Poinsettia (Lynne Redgrave). He immediately recognises her as his ‘other half’. Although Poinsettia is head over heels in love with long-deceased composer Giacomo Puccini, she nevertheless enters into a relationship with Fish, her counterpart in…