About

‘Fairy Tales: Truth, Power and Enchantment’ is presented in conjunction with GOMA’s blockbuster summer exhibition ‘Fairy Tales’. This free cinema program presents beloved classics alongside contemporary retellings. Fairy tales have always been a means of speaking truth to power; challenging injustice and providing hope. This program highlights how filmmakers have innovated on older stories to resonate in different times and contexts.

The program tells these tales across five thematic strands, each strand exploring how fairy tales inform ideas of transformation, identity, and wonder. 'Maiden, Mother, Crone' looks at how fairy tales are used to interrogate societal expectations about age and gender, particularly the way in which women progress through life stages; 'Happy Endings' considers ideas of the good life and how our desires are shaped by our community ideals and economic circumstances; 'Off the Path' celebrates the adventurous nature of fairy tales and how landscapes have been filmed to express the threshold between being lost and finding oneself; 'Becoming Other' looks at how archetypal tropes of transformation in fairy tales are used by filmmakers to connect with questions of identity; and finally 'Storytellers' explores how film, as a relatively new narrative medium, has engaged with older oral and literary forms, making the wondrous and impossible visible.

The program features over 40 films, including the mesmeric special event screenings of silent films.

Live Music & Film: The Adventures of Prince Achmed
11.00am, Sun 3 Dec 2023 | Event concluded

Join us for an enchanted journey through the tales of the Arabian nights in The Adventures of Prince Achmed 1926. Painstakingly made over three years, Lotte Reiniger’s intricately hand-cut silhouette animation is the earliest surviving animated feature film and remains one of the most magical fairy-tale films of all time. Dva (Linsey Pollak and Tunji Beier) will perform a newly composed live accompaniment on experimental wind instruments and percussion.

Live Music & Film: Claire
11.00am, Sun 3 Mar 2024 | Event concluded

Loosely based on a 10th century Japanese story, Claire follows an elderly male couple on a farm in the 1920s American South who find a little girl from the moon inside an ear of corn and raise her as their own. This dreamlike black and white silent film was shot on an antique hand-crank 35mm (Mitchell Standard) camera. Organist David Bailey will provide newly composed live accompaniment to the film on the Gallery’s 1929 Wurlitzer organ.

Live Music & Film: Häxan
6.30pm, Fri 5 Apr 2024 | Event concluded

Benjamin Christensen’s wickedly humorous 1922 docufiction tracing the history of witches from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century is a tour de force of the weird, chilling, and supernatural. Blending an episodic account of the occult with lurid hallucinatory horror, Häxan holds a well-deserved place as one of the preeminent works of silent cinema. Post classical composer Madeleine Cocolas will provide newly composed live accompaniment to the film.

The StoryTeller
2 Dec 2023 – 28 Apr 2024 | Cinema B | Free

Jim Henson’s beloved television series The StoryTeller 1987 will screen daily between 10.30am and 4pm throughout the Fairy Tales exhibition. Told across nine separate episodes, this anthology series draws from several European fairy tales, many of which were first published by the Brothers Grimm. Bringing together a human cast with enchanting puppets developed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, these tales are rich with wonder, mystery and delight.

Program curated by Sophie Hopmeier, Australian Cinémathèque.

QAGOMA acknowledges the generous assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra; the American Genre Film Archive, Austin; the Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna; the National Audiovisual Institute - Kavi, Helsinki; the British Film Institute, London; and the Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles in providing materials for this program.