Legendary Czech director and animator Jan Švankmajer will feature in a retrospective marking both his 90th birthday and 100 years of Surrealism.
"For 60 years, the Prague-born auteur has led viewers into boudoirs of dark humour and surreal metaphors and thickets of fairytale stories and the absurd, creating a unique opposition to various powers (having lived through six political regimes) and conventions," says Riga IFF.
"Švankmajer has worked in countless media and lengths of film, gaining recognition with his sumptuous static frames and mixed-technique and clay animation imbued with a breath of Surrealism, psychoanalysis, and European post-war modernism. Riga IFF will present his most acclaimed and also underrated features and short films, previously unscreened in Latvia –- among them his early experiments from the 1960s, a gothic version of Alice in Wonderland, meditations on fetishes, food, politics, and the role of art in public and personal life."
Švankmajer retrospective screenings will take place over two weekends,19–20 and 26–27 October,at the festival’s main venue, cinema Splendid Palace. A documentary film on the director’s life and work will be screened online throughout Latvia.
The RIGA IFF retrospective will include Švankmajer’s possibly most known feature film, Alice (1987), regarded as the most astute interpretation of the heroine, based on the characters and universe of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The director has deemed the book as the best literary work created by humankind. The festival will also screen the provocative feature film Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) – a journey into the Decameron-esque tales of Prague and the absurd-filled lives of six strangers. A screen fairytale for adults, it unabashedly reflects on the pleasures of the flesh and the individual, urge for satisfaction, and inability to communicate.
Both in person and online, an expansive odyssey of Švankmajer’s personal and creative life will be offered by Adam Olha and Jan Danhel’s documentary Athanor – The Alchemical Furnace (2020), a travelogue through the filmography of the Surrealists of Eastern Europe, studio Athanor, and his fascinating biography. The culmination of the retrospective will be a screening of 9 Švankmajer’s short films, showcasing a rally of unpredictable styles, themes, and forms
On 18 July, the first tickets to this year’s Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF, 17–27 October) go on sale. More deails at the Riga IFF website: rigaiff.lv
