The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1990) is an existential drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Port and Kit Morsbu, Americans adrift after a decade of marriage, travel deep into postwar North Africa — not as tourists, but as two people hoping the Sahara will fix something they can't name.

It doesn't. Morocco gives way to Algeria, the desert grows wider, and the marriage grows thinner. A travelling companion, George Tunner, complicates things. Port falls ill. Kit keeps moving. Bertolucci adapted Paul Bowles' 1949 novel, and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography — that thick, golden African light — carries as much weight as any line of dialogue. Bowles himself appears briefly on screen.

This is deliberately slow cinema, all landscape and dissolution. Not a film about plot; a film about two people watching their world come apart in beautiful, indifferent heat. Stream The Sheltering Sky (1990) online on iFILM.