This is Snow White unlike you’ve never—yes never—seen her before… Julie Christie features opposite national treasure Toby Jones, Hanns Zischler (iconic partner in roaming of Wim Wenders’ arthouse classic Kings of the Road) and stage/screen star Stephen Dillane (Game of Thrones), with Stacy Martin (Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac) as Snow White herself.
The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser’s titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brother’s Grimm fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film, Branca de Neve /Snow White (2000), which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play.
Adapted for the screen from the poignant dramatic version by the late, great Swiss writer Robert Walser, a “wonderful, heartbreaking writer” (Susan Sontag). Sontag adds, “the moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination.”
This is central to the appeal of the work for the film’s director, artist Stanley Schtinter (“Warholian” – The Guardian), who insists that the film, his first feature-length work, will only ever be shown on a single 35mm film print as a defence of cinema as a place and as a principle. Produced by The Raid‘s Gareth Evans, and shot by Safdie Brothers DoP Sean Price Williams (Good Time), this is an unmissable cinematic vision.
“A parable for our post-truth times.”
– International Film Festival Rotterdam