This screening is part of Asia Society’s film series Water and Oil: The Movies of Ang Lee; a complete retrospective from February 14-23 with select appearances by the filmmaker and collaborators. [More info]

Several Hollywood titans considered and dismissed the idea of adapting Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” novel about a boy lost at sea before Ang Lee accepted the challenge, creating a crowd-pleasing spectacle whose sophisticated use of CGI holds up nearly fifteen years later, with a breaktaking pair of performances from Suraj Sharma and the late, great Irfan Khan.

Pi Patel is a boy from Pondicherry whose family runs a zoo. He’s good at math and preoccupied with religion, to the chagrin of his atheist father. When political turmoil makes their life in India untenable, Pi’s father decides to put his family and the zoo animals on a ship to Canada. A storm takes the ship down and Pi resurfaces in a lifeboat along with an orangutan and a full-grown Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Encountering sharks, storms, and a bioluminescent island along the way, Pi navigates the open sea, facing down the vast cold universe in an epic search for land and meaning. Lee’s innovation on the novel introduces us to Pi as an adult, living safely in Canada, and sharing his tale of survival with a bewildered journalist as we watch it unfold.

Followed by a Q&A with filmmaker, Ang Lee.