The Slovakian director Juraj Jakubisko is a master filmmaker whose work was suppressed during the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, yet who came back with an artistic vengeance. His lush, detail-filled mise-en-scène has visual links to Svankmajer but his spiritual compatriots might be Fellini, on the one hand, Voltaire on the other; fantasy and allegory are intertwined. You can't view humanity straight on, Jakubisko's orbiting camera seems to say; you've got to take a bee's-eye view, strafe and frighten, then fly away again. Jakubisko's masterpiece, The Millennial Bee is a multi-layered narrative, an epic tale of a family in a remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1890 and the start of World War I. Sensuality-love-making, food, nature-is the daily fare for this family, whose paterfamilias, Martin (Jozef Kroner), is a bricklayer, beekeeper, map-maker and dreamer. But joy becomes somehow surreptitious, in a time of great changes and hovering sorrow for Slovaks who, having been (blissfully if indigently) marginalized, are called upon to die for the Empire. The film follows the fates of Martin's two sons, one who becomes a bourgeois, the other who tries to hold on to the richness of peasant life. The Millennial Bee, with its moments of magic bursting forth from a Breughel-like canvas, is the best illustration of Jakubisko's efforts to portray death as a part of life-and life as a miracle. When it rains bees, we are not surprised; when Martin returns from the dead, we wonder what took him so long.