Join the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Grand Rapids Film Society for a screening of Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' (2011).
Inspired by GRAM's exhibition The Matter of Awe: Landscapes in Art (on view Nov 22, 2025 - Aug 16, 2026), this collaboration celebrates the work of filmmaker Terrence Malick, with a film retrospective honoring his lifelong devotion and attention toward nature and the landscape.
6pm Social hour
7pm Movie start time
This is a free event. Registration is required.
Location: Grand Rapids Art Museum
Terrence Malick’s vast, unfurling magnum opus, The Tree of Life (2011), is no less than a palatial meditation on memory and the nature of life itself, oscillating between the intimate and the cosmic. Set against a quiet suburb in 1950s Texas, the film traces the childhood of Jack O’Brien, his nostalgic reckoning of his parents, and their role in his upbringing: his mother, an emblem of grace, and his father, stern and remote. Through Jack’s recollections, Malick renders the mundane rhythms of family life with a religious attentiveness.
Sweeping between the primordial birth of the universe and the ethereal lenses of childhood memories, The Tree of Life collapses the infinite and the minute — the metaphysical and the personal — in a majestic film that many consider his masterpiece. “Help each other,” commands Malick in an elegiac and whispered prayer, arriving at us through montages of dappled light and tender touch. “Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.”
Before the film, the Grand Rapids Film Society will offer a brief introduction to help set the scene and provide context for the films production, and GRAM staff will share insights on how each film connects to the history of landscape painting.
Contact: For more information, contact Associate Curator, Terra Warren at
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Cost: Free
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