One of the most visually magnificent films of all time. A haunting, transgressive period romance.

“It might be one of the first films that I saw where I fully understood what it means for a director to have a vision,” she says. “Nothing is said. It is all felt." - Maria Silverstein.

Perhaps the greatest indication of The Piano’s legacy is that it continues to resonate with and inspire new audiences. Film writer Laura Venning wrote her undergraduate thesis on Jane Campion, after discovering The Piano at the age of 16. “I was just getting interested in film and beginning to dutifully make my way through the canon, though I truthfully didn’t feel much of a personal connection with any of it at that point,” she tells BBC Culture. “When I watched The Piano for the first time I was expecting something restrained and melancholy, like Merchant Ivory, so I was astonished and a little unnerved to be transported into this dark, transgressive Gothic story where female desire and female creativity are unstoppable forces.”

For New Zealand film critic Maria Lewis, Campion’s cultural identity is part of what makes The Piano so special: “Jane Campion has always centred the female narrative. Not the female narrative as Hollywood knows it, but the kind that's familiar to a New Zealand and even an Asia-Pacific audience: women who are unusual, women who are complicated and talented, women who are weird, women who have overcome, women who march to the beat of their own drum – or piano, if you will." Certainly it feels as though the specificity of The Piano is part of its unique charm – it’s a fairytale, but one so steeped in the harshness of reality, it feels at once familiar and bracingly different from anything that came before it.