This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composter Michael Nyman.  Our second film in the series is 1985’s A Zed and Two Noughts, a beautifully disturbing and darkly humorous take on erotic obsession and death.

When a swan causes a car accident in front of the Rotterdam Zoo, two women die and a third, Alba (Andrea Ferréol), loses her leg. Their two grieving husbands, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon), fixate on their wives’ bodies, and slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition, even going as far as to meticulously craft exquisitely morbid time-lapsed films of decaying creatures. As the film evolves into an increasingly bizarre scientific fantasia, things get even stranger when a mad surgeon schemes to use Alba as a subject for his own experiments in animal symmetry. Highlighted by painterly compositions inspired by Vermeer, a hypnotic score by Nyman, and Greenaway’s signature dark comedy, A Zed and Two Noughts is a stylish and unsettling exploration of mortality and the limits of control.

About GREENAWAY & NYMAN

Peter Greenaway Michael Nyman on the set of Prospero’s Books. Photo by Jacques PRAYER/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images)

British artist, writer, and director Peter Greenaway’s cinema is unmistakable — baroque, cerebral, and boldly theatrical, his films unfold like elaborate paintings, rich with symbolism, obsession, and wry absurdity. Equally distinctive is fellow British composer Michael Nyman, whose hypnotic, minimalist scores pulse with alternating elegance and urgency. Together, their collaborations form a sublime marriage of image and sound, a cinematic alchemy that’s as unsettling as it is exquisite. In our series Greenaway & Nyman, The Frida Cinema presents five of their most iconic collaborations, providing filmgoers a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in these signature masterpieces of sight and sound.

Our series begins with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a visually lush mystery that sets the tone for Greenaway’s preoccupations with artifice, geometry, and sexual politics. The surreal A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) dives into symmetry, decay, and evolution, setting its tale of twin zoologists against time-lapse decompositions and haunting harpsichords. In Drowning by Numbers (1988), three women named Cissie Colpitts methodically dispatch their husbands in a darkly comic ballet of murder and counting. Our series ends with perhaps their most infamous collaboration, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), a lurid, operatic fable of gluttony and vengeance, drenched in color and scored with tragic grandeur. Each film is a sensuous, intellectual puzzle, all the more provocative and mesmerizing in the hands of Greenaway and Nyman.