Awarded Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema at the 2014 BAFTAs, Peter Greenaway, one of the most inventive, ambitious and controversial film-makers of our time, returns to the cinematic arena of The Draughtsman’s Contract in a film that brilliantly showcases his legendary trademarks for breath-taking visual framing and provocative subject-matters.

Winner of Best Film Out of Official Competition at the Rome Film Festival, GOLTZIUS AND THE PELICAN COMPANY explores the life of celebrated 16th century Dutch painter, printer and engraver, Hendrik Goltzius, and is Greenaway's second biopic on Dutch Masters after NIGHTWATCHING. 

In the winter of 1590, Hendrik Goltzius (Ramsey Nasr, also an author and the Dutch Poet Laureate from Jan 2009 – Jan 2013), the celebrated Dutch printer, painter and engraver, persuades his patron, the liberal-minded Margrave of Alsace, played by F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus, The Grand Budapest Hotel), to pay for a printing press which will enable him to create an extraordinary deluxe edition of the Old Testament featuring frank illustrations of such erotic tales as the story of Lot and his daughters, the adultery of David and Bathsheba and the seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s Wife. In order to make the deal more attractive to the Margrave and his court, Goltzius, along with the male and female members of his Pelican Printing Company, offers to stage live dramatisations of six biblical tales, each of which will demonstrate a different sexual taboo.