BELLADONNA OF SADNESS

CANADIAN PREMIERE

Never before officially released in North America, this one-of-a-kind cult classic can now be enjoyed in all of its splendour through a new restoration based on original negatives. Fans of animation, witchcraft, psychedelia, radical artwork and everything taboo: don’t miss the chance to see Belladonna of Sadness.

This ultimate dark star of Anime was produced by the legendary Osamu Tezuka’s studio Mushi Production (Astroboy, Kimba). Based on a book by Jules Michelet (Satanism and Witchcraft, 1862), it tells the tragic feminist tale of a 14th-century peasant woman driven by religious oppression to give herself body and soul to witchcraft and the sulphurous charms of the devil. In the hands of director Eiichi Yamamoto and art director Kuni Fukai, it becomes a uniquely demented film, hovering somewhere between Koji Wakamatsu (United Red Army) and Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain). Graphically and thematically, it springs equally from ’60s revolutionary fervour and ’70s psychedelic rock opera, the whole bathed in the Art Nouveau of Klimt, Redon, Mucha and Schiele. A psychotropic, hallucinatory experience that will leave no one untouched. - Julien Fonfrède