Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has achieved the status of a cult classic. The film adapts the tricks of cinema to the art of the fairy tale to inscribe a young girl's passage from innocence to womanhood with eerie beauty. In a constantly surprising mixture of gentle eroticism and gothic nightmare, shot through with cobwebs and lace, thirteen-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerova) innocently turns the denizens of a turn-of-the-century village into the fairies and demons of childhood-a childhood that is at once distinctly female and ageless. The dark fruits of repression are both mocked and oddly savored in the film's bizarre imagery: Grandmother-vampire cavorts with a lascivious priest; a procession of nuns crosses a field of wheat into unimagined realms of sensuality; a father is a weasel, a lover is a brother; a mother's sparkling earrings hold the key to all that is magical in sexuality.