Film Screenings

Tuesday 10.11.2026

Frozen Nights Serie 2: SUBZERO (EN)

🕐3:30 pm
Recommended audience: 12 years and older  
Duration: 50 minutes
📍Venue: Studio Cinema, Cultural Centre Valve, Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Wednesday 11.11.2026

ALICE (Něco z Alenky, 1989, 86 min) 
with introduction by Pavel Bednarik (EN)

🕐01:30–3:30 pm
Recommended audience: 12 years and older  
📍Venue: Studio Cinema, Cultural Centre Valve, Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu

Jan Švankmajer’s first feature film. Alice is a dark and unsettling adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which sets the entire Wonderland within a sort of deranged cellar complex. There, ordinary everyday objects, rubbish and even parts of dead animals take on a magical and living quality. So let yourself be drawn into a dreamlike world where a woollen sock and a set of dentures can become a caterpillar, and where jam jars contain not only jam but also drawing pins. Just don’t forget to close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see a thing.

Frozen Nights Serie 3: AVALANCHE (EN)

🕐5:00 pm
Recommended audience: 15 years and older
Duration: 45 minutes
📍Venue: Studio Cinema, Cultural Centre Valve, Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Thursday 12.11.2026

Jan Švankmajer Retrospective
with introduction by Pavel Bednarik (EN)

🕐6:00 pm
Recommended audience: 12 years and older
Duration: 90 minutes
📍Venue: Studio Cinema, Cultural Centre Valve, Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu

Short film selection covering different artistic styles and approaches of Švankmajer’s work. The whole selection curated by Pavel Bednařík, will be introduced with a short lecture about the work of Jan Švankmajer.

1965 – A Game with Stones (Hra s kameny, 7 min)
Every hour on the hour, the wall clock shoots out stones that form mosaics and patterns. Each time, the stones are larger, more colourful and the resulting mosaic more artistic. Eventually, however, the mass of stones becomes so great that it
destroys the clock’s delicate mechanism.

1966 – Punch and Judy (Rakvičkárna, 10 min)
One of Jan Švankmajer’s earliest auteur films reflects his fascination with old fairground booths and puppet theatre, known in England as Punch and Judy.
Puppets beat each other over the head with mallets, hammer themselves into a coffin and, in short, fight to the last scrap of wood and splinter over a live guinea pig that Kašpar is rearing – the only one to survive this fierce battle. The score was composed by Zdeněk Liška.

1967 – Historia Naturae (9 min)
One of Jan Švankmajer’s earliest animated films introduces props that would become characteristic of his later work: animated museum exhibits, feathers, bones and meat, and so on. All of this comes to life in a thrilling dance that unfolds across eight short ‘encyclopaedic’ chapters.

1968 – The Garden (Zahrada, 16 min)
Director Jan Švankmajer’s grotesque parable is based on Ivan Kraus’s short story The Living Hedge. With playful exaggeration, it tells the story of a man who shows an old acquaintance his villa and garden, surrounded by a hedge – a literally ‘living’ one, as it consists not of bushes but of people about whom the villa’s owner knows a thing or two…

1971 – Jabberwocky (Žvahlav aneb Šatičky slaměného Huberta, 14 min)
A magic wardrobe, a sailor’s outfit, a cat and doll soup. Imaginative games from the world of toys, rich in interpretative possibilities, which come to life even without adults present.

1982 – Dimensions of dialogue (Možnosti dialogu, 12 min)
Interpersonal communication has its pitfalls. Three animated vignettes on a single theme, presented by the master of surrealism, Jan Švankmajer. As in his trick design work Svankmajer and his animator Bedřich Glaser are using clay animation, which is crucial for his later short films.

1992 – Food (Jídlo, 17 min)
In the animated film Food, Jan Švankmajer uses his characteristic fantastical visual style to take an ironic look at humanity’s eternal gluttony and the transience of life. In this 1992 film, the artist and director combines animation with live actors, as he does in his other films.
 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Friday 13.11.2026

Frozen Nights Serie 1: BLIZZARD (EN)

🕐9:00 am
Recommended audience: 7 years and older
Buration: 45 minutes
📍Paikka: Pakkala hall, Central Library Saari 4th floor, Kaarlenväylä 3, 90100 Oulu

Films from Children’s Culture Centre Kotilo’s Summer 2026 Masterclass / Witch and A Mermaid in a Jar 

🕐4:00 pm
Recommended audience: 7 years and older
Duration: 45 minuuttia
📍Venue: Studio Cinema, Cultural Centre Valve, Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu

Frozen Nights Summer Masterclass took place in summer 2026. The theme of the Do You Want to Learn to Fly? masterclass was pixilation, a stop-motion technique using people as the animated subjects. The young participants were guided by animation artist Malakias.

The screening features three films made during the masterclass: Mies kenties, Definitely Not Ghostbusters and Epäillyttävä kirja. The programme also includes two films by Malakias: Witch and A Mermaid in a Jar.