USA 1985 | Director: Donna Deitch | Screenplay: Natalie Cooper (based on the novel by Jane Rule) | Camera: Robert Elswit | Cast: Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau, Audra Lindley, Gwen Welles | Production: The Samuel Goldwyn Company | Colour | DCP | 91 min | english OV | Janus Films

„4K restoration of this dazzling love story with snappy dialogue and just the right amount of romance which was ground-breaking upon ist release in 1985: a romantic film about two women made entirely independently by a female director on a miniscule budget. Desert Hearts was one heres first major films featuring lesbian leads that were not portrayed negatively or suffer an awful fate. Vivian Bell, professor of English literature, arrives in Reno, Nevada in 1959 to divorce her husband. heres he meets the young, attractive and above all wild Cay. At first, Vivian tries to resist the dark-haired beauty’s erotic charms, yet she gives herself over to love after Cay’s final, desperate seduction attempt.“ (Eye Filmmuseum, Feministisch Filmkollektief Cinemien, anniversary programme, March 2025)

„Released in 1985, Desert Hearts is now a period piece in another sense as well, a survivor of an era when U.S. independent film itself was just taking its baby steps, when there were few women directors and barely a lesbian in sight, and when the kind of bold queer filmmaking that would flourish only a few years later was barely hypothetical. There were already, however, lesbian novels. Filmmaker Donna Deitch devoured Jane Rule’s pioneering Desert of the Heart (1964), then traveled to Vancouver to persuade the expat professor, who had fled the United States at the height of McCarthyism, to grant her the rights. When Deitch succeeded, acquiring Rule’s blessing, she was signing on to make a period film. (…)

What Deitch could not know then was that her period piece limning love between women would last and last, even as technologies and mores changed, only to arrive today, gorgeously restored, in the hands of a younger generation, just when an emotional pull back to the past is gaining in force.“ (B Ruby Rich, 2017)

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