“Mutzmag” is an Appalachian variant of a Scottish tale, “Molly Whuppy,” brought to the United States by early immigrants. It is set in the Appalachian baclcwoods, circa 1920. Mutzmag is a 12-year-old girl who lives with her mother and her two abusive half-sisters, Poll and Nance, in a tumble-down shack on the edge of a cabbage patch. After their mother dies, the girls decide to leave the mountain shack and “seek their fortunes” in the city. On the way they encounter a witch and a simple-minded, but brutal giant who plot to kill and eat the girls.
Category: Fantasy
A newspaper sends a young reporter into the Russian countryside to make a nice, sensationalist yarn out of some strange stories going around. Once in the countryside, Igor is accommodated by a peasant family living in the middle of nowhere close to a ruined church. The family is convinced that their dead patriarch will return from the dead as a blood-drinking fiend exactly nine and a half days after his demise.
Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Terayama’s final and elaborate opus takes place on a remote Okinawan island, where a mythical time law rules and shapes memories, life and even death. Sutekichi and his cousin Su-e love each other, attracting the attention and insults of the superstitious inhabitants of an isolated village beyond time. When Sutekichi murders his rival Daisaku, the couple decides to flee from the village, but Sutekichi is haunted by Daisaku’s ghost and increasingly affected by the unforgiving course of time.
Petro is a modest farmhand living in an impoverished village in some unspecified long-ago era. He wants to marry the lovely Pidorka, but her stern father won’t hear of it. The mischievous demon Basavriuk, offers a deal, enticing Petro into crime for the sake of fortune. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (“St John’s Eve”) and Ukrainian folk tales.
Wafer factory-owner P. Tinto and his wife Olivia want a their own child more than anything else in the world, but after years of trying, they have nothing but a pair of extraterrestrial midgets living in their spare bedroom. When they decide to try adoption, a series of misroutings and chance encounters results in an escaped adult mental patient arriving at their door with adoption papers in hand. P. Tinto and Olivia accept this without question and welcome him in as their son. Can this family arrangement work?
A poor working girl goes to a ball and falls in love with the prince. Based on the famous European folk tale as told by Charles Perrault, with Russian verse by Genrikh Sapgir.
This exquisite Soviet animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale tells the story of a water-dwelling maiden, Rusalochka, who trades her voice for legs after falling in love with a human prince. The story transitions between the black and white human world of Copenhagen, where tourists believe in love but not in mermaids, and the gorgeously vibrant visuals of the underwater mermaid kingdom, accompanied by Aleksandr Lokshin’s haunting music.
In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.