New Digital Restoration!

Friday, October 21 & Saturday, October 22

(1988) dir Andrzej Zulawski w/ Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Grazyna Dylag, Waldemar Kownacki, Iwona Bielska [166 min; DCP]
“Space travel and pagan rituals converge with the ruins of modern warfare and the dawn of civilization in Zulawski’s ecstatic, image-drunk science-fiction fantasy, which he filmed in the mid-nineteen-seventies and completed in 1987. It’s among the most visually extravagant films ever made. Based on a novel by his great-uncle, Jerzy, the surrealistic and allusive story involves two astronauts falling in love on a distant planet, where they propitiate the natives with psychedelic drugs and get trapped in gory battles of warring tribes, delivering incantatory dialogue in prophetic howls. Zulawski films it all with a wildly gyrating camera that scampers across fields, vaults over hilltops, thrusts through phalanxes of warriors, and pivots to reveal soldiers dancing on the beach in front of orange flames. One astronaut leaves a video diary, and another, finding it, is mistaken for the Messiah and crucified, but the extreme obscurity of the plot conceals the over-all point – the quest for freedom and the role of religion in that quest.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker