Emerging from the void, mysterious drifter Gaunt (The Sting’s John Heffernan) wanders the upstate countryside in a daze with only his bible for company. But after happening upon the murder of a local female housekeeper at the hands of a rural deviant, Gaunt soon finds himself framed for the attack. Forced to flee deeper into the woods with the only witness to the crime –the woman’s young deaf mute son Jesse — the pair forge a complex bond that culminates in one of cinema’s mostmemorable, psychedelic, and unclassifiable endings.

A “lost” marvel of independent filmmaking, Time of the Heathen is set in the immediate shadow of the atomic bomb, yet narrativized through the groundbreaking aesthetics and shifting racial politics of the 1960s. Directed by Peter Kass, best known for his pathbreaking work in the New York theater world, and strikingly lensed by visual artist and avant garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, Heathen is major discovery for even the most well-versed cinephiles.