Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Alice in Wonderland meets Nosferatu in this late masterpiece of the Czech New Wave from Jaromil Jireš (The Safebreaker, MIFF 1975; Romance, MIFF 1967).

Folktales and Freudian symbolism collide in a 13-year-old’s phantasmagoric concoction. Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová, who also stars in MIFF 70 film Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!) finds that the arrival of puberty has put her on a path to a realm of adult danger, where shapeshifting menaces – a vampiric grandmother, a pervy priest and a masked devil – threaten to hijack her initiation into womanhood. Will she emerge with her dignity, and sanity, intact?

Set in a gorgeously Gothic fairytale village, Jireš’s alternately dreamlike and nightmarish coming-of-age work takes a hypnotic, free-floating approach to one young girl’s quest to survive her incipient sexual awakening. Adapted from a 1945 novel by surrealist writer Vítězslav Nezval and released in 1970, just after the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders slyly disguises an anti-authoritarian attitude in a swirling melange of impeccable production design and ravishingly ethereal imagery.