Nominated for eight Academy Awards, Francis Ford Coppola’s stunning vision of the heart of darkness in all of us remains a classic and compelling Vietnam War epic.
Martin Sheen stars as Army Captain Willard, a troubled man sent on a dangerous and mesmerising odyssey into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade American Colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has succumbed to the horrors of war and barricaded himself in a remote outpost.
This screening is of the 2019 rerelease Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, which was remastered from the original negative in 4K Ultra HD.
The screening on Sunday 4 May will include a special introduction by Harriet Earle, senior lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University:
The Vietnam War narrative is all about the USA; young, white boys go off to war to become men. But they are only a small part of the story. What of the Vietnamese themselves? Of women and girls? And of the men who come home? Vietnam War cinema often gives them no space to speak. So, what does Apocalypse Now do with the silences? Do we hear new voices in this retelling of Joseph Conrad's narrative, superimposed into Vietnam? Or do we find something else entirely?
Harriet Earle is a senior lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University and Research Fellow at the Centre for State Violence at Nipissing University (Canada). She is the author of Silence in the Quagmire: US Comics of the Vietnam War (2025). Her research interests include American comics and popular culture, war and conflict, and fibre art.
Presented in association with Sheffield Hallam University.
