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ASCENDANCY
 | QFT
Saturday 24 April 7.15pm
£6.50/£6.00
|  | | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | Director: Edward Bennett / UK / 1982 / 85 mins / Cert: 15 / Print source: British Film Institute | | | | | | 
| | | | | | | | Belfast, 1920. Connie Wintour, a protestant English aristocrat, is haunted by the loss of her brother, Harry, at the battle of the Somme, and is suffering from a depression which threatens to lapse into severe mental illness.
Sombre and passive, she feels trapped by her bourgeois lifestyle and persecuted by the doctors and nurses who treat her. Her only emotional outlets are the letters she writes to her dead brother, which she hides among his things in his old bedroom.
Wintour, Connie’s father, is an industrialist with a large shipbuilding concern in the city. He claims not to care about the difficult political climate, but is concerned by the increasing civil unrest, which is beginning to affect his business.
Against his daughter’s wishes, he participates in an Orange order march and political rally, and becomes a target for sectarian violence.
Ascendancy won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 1983.
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