Open­ing amid the vio­lence and chaos of England’s 1936 anti-fas­cism protests, Bon­fire Night by Anna Bliss is a mov­ing, unex­pect­ed­ly time­ly debut about the pow­er of art, the cost of ambi­tion, and the trag­ic ten­den­cy of his­to­ry to repeat itself. It is also, at its heart, about the imme­di­ate and endur­ing con­nec­tion that forms between an Irish Catholic pho­tog­ra­ph­er and a Jew­ish med­ical stu­dent — two ordi­nary peo­ple try­ing to sur­vive a dark time. 

While Anna Bliss exam­ines the com­plex­i­ties and chal­lenges of this inter­faith rela­tion­ship with sen­si­tiv­i­ty and the aware­ness of first­hand expe­ri­ence, Bon­fire Night is the rare star-crossed love sto­ry that refus­es to sac­ri­fice real­ism for romance. Instead of ide­al­iz­ing the affair between its pro­tag­o­nists with a ​“love con­quers all” approach, it weighs the pow­er and demands of love in its many forms, mea­sur­ing them against one anoth­er and test­ing the lim­its of each. Roman­tic, mater­nal, patri­ot­ic, famil­ial, cre­ative: what do we do when one form of love demands the betray­al of anoth­er? What is the val­ue of love in the face of loss?