The Annihilation of Fish

New restoration! 

“For much too long, ‘The Annihilation of Fish’ has been in limbo. It took many years and endless persistence to rescue this beautiful, delicate picture… I’m so happy that it’s finally ready for the world to discover.” –  Martin Scorsese

“Critic’s Pick! Genuine independent filmmaking, the kind that transcends formula and expectations.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times 

“Burnett has made a simple yet beguiling film about how two imperfect people can find a kind of perfection in each other’s company — and how sometimes in life, and in the movies, good things do come to those who wait.” – Justin Chang, NPR

“A complete charmer: a masterwork of tonal control that deserves to be reckoned with as much more than an archival curiosity.” –  J. Kim Murphy, Variety 

Poinsettia is a former housewife, living alone with unrequited dreams of romance that only her imagined lover, the 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini, can fulfill. Disgusted at a world that scoffs at her love and her plans of marriage to Puccini, she moves to Los Angeles for a change of scene. Taking a room in the boarding house of feisty Mrs. Muldroone, Poinsettia meets the other new tenant: Fish, a Jamaican widower recently released from an overcrowded mental institution despite his daily physical bouts with an unseen, demonic assailant who attacks him without warning, nor any visible trace.

It’s not long before these neighbors become lovers. What happens next is very special, as Poinsettia and Fish, each regarding the other as nuts, move steadily toward the light of love past all imaginary inconveniences, finally participating fully in each other’s worlds, regardless that this leads to new peaks of imaginative excess.

Part of Three by Charles Burnett