FILM Linenhall screens Pablo Berger’s ‘Blancanieves’

Silence is golden


It’s Snow White kids, but not as we know it. The next screening at Linenhall Film Club is the ravishing cinematic treat ‘Blancanieves’. A grown-up gothic Grimm brothers’ fairytale, this black-and-white, silent Spanish-made reworking of Snow White injects dazzling energy and new life and heart in the old myth.
Set in 1920s Seville, it follows the travails of young heroine Carmen (Sofía Oria and Macarena García), her widowed ex-bullfighter father (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a villainous stepmother (Maribel Verdú) and a travelling band of bullfighting dwarves who take the young girl – who never knew her real mother – under their wing after her step mother’s murderous plans go awry.
The film won the Special Jury Prize at Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2013, as well as the Special Jury Prize and an ex-aequo Best Actress ‘Silver Shell’ Award for Macarena García at the 2012 San SebastiΡn International Film Festival, and ten Goya Awards, including the Goya Award for Best Film at the 27th Goya Awards. Delivered with pure visual panache and a surreal Spanish twist by director Pablo Berger, it is, as Peter Bradshaw put it in his review for The Guardian, “Extraordinarily enjoyable. Superbly good… melancholy, eerie and erotic. A film to treasure.”

‘Blancanieves’ will be screened in the Linenhall Arts Centre on Tuesday, February 11, at 8pm. Admission €5.