Programmed June 2025

In the Deep End: Swimming Pools On-Screen

Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portraits like Deep End and Water Lilies , symbols of suburban middle-class malaise in New Hollywood touchstones like The Graduate and The Swimmer , and dangerously seductive backdrops for sun-splashed thrillers such as La piscine and Sexy Beast , swimming pools have proven uniquely cinematic settings—by turns glamorous, unsettling, sensuous, and surreal stages for provocatively charged, heightened human drama.