Hello, my name is Dustin Clueh, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Import Cinema Club.

And today is our month of challenging ourselves.

That's right.

This month, we are the international cinema club.

That's right.

We are talking about Poverty Row.

No, no, not at all. We're traveling around the world. We're going to countries that we've never visited before. And we're hoping to expand both your and our horizons. That's right. And first we begin in the former Czechoslovakia, but now the Czech Republic. I like how we say, like, expand our horizons, if we're not talking about filmmakers that like, oh, they're pretty big kind of art sensations, aren't they? I guess, but even they... Yeah, I mean, we're talking this week about Jan Schoenckmeier. I'd you never seen any of his movies before? I had seen half of one of his movies, which we're going to be talking about.

And in fact, why am I burying the lead?

I'll just say what the movie is.

Jan Schenkmeier is probably best known for his 1988 film, Alice.

A very strange, surreal, half live action, half animation, what's it, based upon Alice in Wonderland.

Uh, watching the movie again for this episode reminded me that I once wrote an essay for

a university class about Alice in Wonderland and I like compared it to the Jan Frankmeier film

and like included a DVD like whist the essay trying to butter up the teacher to give me a higher grade. Did not work, but she was very appreciative because she had never heard of this version of the movie

Nice, glad you got something right now, which was a very loose adaptation of the original work

I mean the film I think in its original language the title translates to something about Alice just to let you know that like no, this is not an actual retelling of, um, is it through the looking glass or, uh, Adventures in Wonderland is the first one? Uh, don't ask me, I'm not a huge Lewis Carroll expert. Okay. But Jan Schengmeyer, probably one of the best known Czech directors, certainly, uh, one of the best known Czech animators. Surrealists. Or is he a puppeteer, really? Imagine, imagine. Are we going to get into the semantics? What is stop motion? What is puppeteering? What is the real art? Scorsese? Can we get you on the line? I guess you could say he makes, well, not family films, but... No, definitely not. Family adjacent films.

Movies for the dark and twisted child in your family.

Imagine if Tim Burton had stayed good and in fact had matured and gone in strange and

difficult and uncompromising directions.

Imagine if Tim Burton had turned into Louis Benuel.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about Jan Frank Meyer is that he's always considered himself a surrealist.

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