Since its premiere at the 1971 San Francisco International Film Festival Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has achieved the status of a cult classic-which is to say, it has all but disappeared from screens but stubbornly refuses to be erased from the memory of anyone who saw it. 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; timeless symbolism is invented anew. The screenplay, based on the "black" novel by the surrealist poet Vítezslav Nezval, was written by director Jaromil Jires (The Joke) in collaboration with Ester Krumbachova, the ingenious artist and designer best known for her work with Jan Nemec and Vera Chytilova. The film is a constantly surprising mixture of gentle eroticism and gothic nightmare, shot through with cobwebs and lace, as thirteen-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerova) forms the denizens of a turn-of-the-century village into the demons and fairies 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 cross a field of wheat into unimagined realms of sensuality...one's father is a weasel, one's lover a brother...a mother's sparkling earrings hold the key to all that is magical in sexuality...and all the while, Valerie retains the innocent curiosity of the artist.