Psych out to this trippy selection of films, designed to dazzle and elate.

Complementing this year’s Transcender festival of ecstatic, devotional and psychedelic music, our film programme includes sparkling new digital restorations of trippy Japanese anime Belladonna of Sadness, Werner Herzog’s epic trance film Fata Morgana and Sergei Parajanov’s hypnotising masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates. Plus a rare screening of Maya Deren’s voodoo documentary Divine Horsemen.
 

Head Trips: Belladonna of Sadness (18*)

8.30pm

19 September 2016

Cinema 3

One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese animation, Belladonna of Sadness circulated for years in bootleg form among anime enthusiasts before being painstaking digitally restored last year. 

Head Trips: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (15*)

4pm

24 September 2016

Cinema 3

In 1946, Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon) became the first filmmaker ever awarded an artistic Guggenheim grant. With the $3,000 prize money, she travelled to Haiti. Divine Horsemen began as a study of Haitian dance, but that plan was quickly eclipsed as Deren become increasingly personally engaged with voodoo and its practitioners, eventually becoming initiated as a mambo, or Voodoo Priestess, herself. 

Head Trips: The Colour of Pomegranates (U)

8.30pm

26 September 2016

Cinema 3

The director Serjei Parajanov spent five years exiled in a Soviet prison camp for the ‘transgression’ of creating this mystical, wildly beautiful film. Perhaps only Jodorowsky’sThe Holy Mountain is quite so beautiful… or so weird. 

Head Trips: Fata Morgana (PG)

8.30pm

27 September 2016

Cinema 3

One of the strangest entries in a filmography famed for its strangeness, Fata Morgana is described by its director Werner Herzog as an “Expressionist documentary film.” Non-narrative in structure, it operates on a poetic, visual level and is probably best approached as an epic trance film.