QUILLS Closing Night Gala

From the director of the first major studio NC-17 film comes a provocative, daring tale of passion, persecution and the uncrushable spirit of the human imagination. Philip Kaufman (THE RIGHT STUFF, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, HENRY AND JUNE) directs this erotic fiction. Penned by Doug Wright, the screenplay was adapted from his Obie Award-winning play.

Deep in the corridors of the Charenton Asylum, past the giggles of madmen and the clanking of chains, a writer sits, penning page after page of incendiary prose. Stories so erotic, so deeply perverse, that Napoleon himself issues an order to silence the man at any cost. The writer’s name? The Marquis de Sade.

Academy Award-winner Geoffrey Rush stars as the notorious Marquis whose blasphemous writings are encouraged by a God-fearing priest, Abbe de Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who believes in curing the insane through his humanistic principles. As Coulmier urges him to write, “to purge his evil thoughts upon the page,” an adoring chambermaid, Madeleine LeClerc (two time Academy Award-nominee Kate Winslet) abets the Marqui’s cause and smuggles the scandalous writings out of the asylum for publication. Both risk everything for this wicked genius, until a new doctor (Academy Award-winner Michael Caine) arrives at Charenton hell-bent on “curing” the Marquis of his nasty writing habit by any means necessary.