Metrograph

A tale you’ll know well—innocent girl presents herself as sacrifice to a cursed, freakish beast living in isolation, and learns to live with and love her captor—but turned into something very, very different in Herz’s morbid imagining. Reworking well-known source material into this dark, grimly atmospheric fable, Herz defamiliarizes it, imagining a beaked bird/snake/mammal hybrid Beast unlike any seen on screen before, and overlaying the proceedings with a heavy air of impending doom, the sense of real danger that’s missing from better-known versions, the possibility of violence looming constantly close at hand.

North American Distributor: Severin Films

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Introduction by actor Iva Janžurová on Saturday, October 25th