Name: FINNISH WINTER FANTASY DOUBLE FEATURE — The Snow Queen (1986) + The White Reindeer (1952) — $5
Start: 2024-12-12T19:00:00-06:00
Location: Arkadin Cinema & Bar

$FINNISH WINTER FANTASY DOUBLE FEATURE \u2014 The Snow Queen (1986) + The White Reindeer (1952) \u2014 $5$

Something magical must happen in the frozen white north of Finland. They produce incredibly rich, captivating and surprisingly sinister fantasies with apparent ease. On Dec. 12, Arkadin brings you two vastly underseen masterpieces from Suomi, a New Wave snow-globe “Alice in Wonderland” (THE SNOW QUEEN) and a thrilling ethnographic vampire reindeer ghost tale (THE WHITE REINDEER). See them both for just $5!
THE SNOW QUEEN (1986)
The most visually baroque and enchantedly nightmarish adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale! Päivi Hartzell’s THE SNOW QUEEN is a surreal and sinister film with such an astonishingly eye-popping style that it’s been enshrined as a perennial Beacon tradition. The Snow Queen, looking like a Butoh performer from Mars, needs an emerald frozen inside the ice to rule the universe with the Crown of Darkness. But she can’t access the precious stone with her own icy hands; she needs a gallant boy with warm hands to commit the deed with a mystical black sword. For this purpose she abducts Kai. The film follows Kai’s sister Kerttu on her journey to rescue her brother. Kerttu travels through beautiful and hostile lands, contending with a parade of strange and threatening characters on the way, from extravagantly costumed rococo witches to filthy glam-punk robbers hiding and singing shanties in the mountains. Director Päivi Hartzell came from a background in theatrical costume design and worked for years to bring this dream project to the screen. Cosmically strange and overflowing with a scarred sense of childlike wonder this rarely seen landmark of Finnish cinema is the perfect wintry fantasy epic!
86 min.
THE WHITE REINDEER (1952)
The directorial debut of Finnish cinematographer Erik Blomberg, THE WHITE REINDEER is one of world cinema’s criminally under-seen masterpieces. A vampiric fairy-tale set amongst the starkly beautiful fells of Finnish Lapland, Blomberg combines an almost documentary filming style with avant-garde experimentation to produce a dreamy art-house horror film without compare. A newly-married young woman, Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen), becomes frustrated and lonely as her husband, a reindeer herder for a small Arctic village, spends much of his time away from home in devotion to his work. Desperate for affection, she visits a shaman who offers a potion that makes her an irresistible object of desire, but there is a terrible cost. Pirita becomes a bloodthirsty shapeshifter who lures men out into the barren wilderness where she consumes them. With its portrayals of gender inequality, societal pressures and sexual anxiety (represented through animal transformation, echoes of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People…), The White Reindeer is a timeless classic that deserves to be rediscovered and recognized as a defining film in the horror and fantasy genres.
68 min.
This film is screening as part of Arkadin’s December-long series, IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER, spotlighting films that show winter in all its dark, desolate beauty.