This film screened 20th July 2016.
A pubescent girl explores her burgeoning sexuality with a number of taboo figures: father, priest, brother, other women, and a menagerie of nightmarish vampire creatures. Eroticism and dread combine in the heady fever-dream that is Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Based on the avant-garde novel by Vítězslav Nezval, a key figure in Czech surrealism, Valerie is a cornerstone of the explosion of creativity in the ‘60s that came to be known as the Czech New Wave. Associative editing techniques create a hallucinatory collage of images that is at once unsettling and intoxicating.
Print provided by the National Film Archive/Národní Filmový archive of the Czech Republic.
Screening as part of Haunted Landscapes, A Season of Folk Horror. July 16th-30th.