Strange Cinema: Experimental Animation Double Feature

We're getting freaky this Friday the 13th with a double feature screening of two truly unique animated films.

THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (DIE KATHEDRALE DER NEUEN GEFÜHLE) – 2006, Dir. Helmut Herbst. On a shortlist with Eiichi Yamamoto’s BELLADONNA OF SADNESS and René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET as one of the most surreal, psychedelic and truly cosmic animated features ever made, German director Helmut Herbst’s utterly insane THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS follows a commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who get set adrift in space in 1972 in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Various space flotsam smashes into the windshield – enormous insects, Mighty Mouse, a Bird Man from “Flash Gordon” – while hypnotic Krautrock drones in the background moaning “Where am I??”, and a naked man bounces up and down off a massive red pepper. So begins our descent down the psychotic rabbit hole of CATHEDRAL, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout if there ever was one.

Rated: R

Runtime: 60 minutes

Language: German with English Subtitles

GWEN AND THE BOOK OF SAND (GWEN ET LE LIVRE DE SABLE) – 1985, La Traverse Films. Why search the sand for answers? It has told us everything,” whispers Roseline (voiced by Michel Robin), the 173-year old desert nomad narrator of French director Jean-François Laguionie’s hauntingly poetic animated feature of life after the apocalypse, where the few hardy survivors walk on stilts from well to well, scorpions glow like lanterns, and the mysterious Makou drops giant everyday objects – forks, eyeglasses, bathtubs – from the skies. Into this desolate science-fiction landscape, part-DUNE, part-FURY ROAD, emerges the story’s teenage heroine, Gwen (voiced by Lorella Di Cicco), who refuses to stay silent and hide in the shadows – and whose love for teenage boy Nokmoon, kidnapped by the Makou and its followers, will drive her and Roseline on an epic journey across the endless sands, “the still silence of chaos and oblivion.”

Rating: N/A

Runtime: 64 min

Language: French with English Subtitles

****Please note: Due to the content of one or more of the films this program is not recommended for audiences under 17 years of age.