CHARLES Darwin meets Alfred Hitchcock in an intriguing true-life tale of paradise lost at Pocklington Arts Centre on Tuesday night.

The new documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden records the Adam-and-Eve adventures of a German doctor, his patient/lover, a self-styled Swiss Family Robinson, and a gun-toting, free-loving baroness who gate-crashed their Eden in the Galapagos in the 1930s.

Documentary film-makers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller have pieced together evidence of the dangerous clash of personalities that tore apart paradise almost 90 years ago and gave rise to a mystery that made tiny Floreana Island as famous for its ignominy as its iguanas.

Their film presents a shocking tale of broken dreams, sex and murder that gripped the newspapers even as Europe prepared for war. Drawing on previously unseen home-movie footage of the settlers, letters, contemporaneous reports and interviews with today’s inhabitants, the directors recreate the bizarre events that led to two missing persons and three suspicious deaths.

Over two hours, Goldfine and Geller construct a whodunit, wherein the landscape of the Galapagos is as much a star as Cate Blanchett’s voiced role as Floreana, a put-upon 'Eve'. Dore Strauch, Diane Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Thomas Kretschmann, Sebastian Koch, Gustaf Skarsgård and Josh Radnor all make vocal contributions too.

“Hollywood had been trying to make it as a fiction forever,” says co-director Dayna Goldfine. “The reason why it hasn't happened yet, although scripts have been flying around for over 20 years, is that it is such a complicated story, and there are so many characters. Each one is worthy of their own script, certainly they are all larger than life.”

The 7pm screening will be supported by an exhibition by Thixendale wildlife artist Robert Fuller, who visited the Galapagos for the first time last year to record its flora and fauna. His work will be open to the public for a week after the film show, and on the night he will take questions from the audience, in the company of Ecuadorian naturalist Santiago Bejerano, who founded the Bishop Burton tour company Think Galapagos with his wife Rachel Dex.

Tickets can be booked on 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk