ACTEON (1967)

Spain (MIFF2016,Escuela de Barcelona)
Director: Jorge Grau

An expressionist reimagining of the classic Greek myth involving Acteón and Diana, transposed to Spain's Costa Brava by a future auteur of horror cinema.

Based on the myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Acteón accidentally catches a glimpse of Diana, the goddess of love, and is subsequently turned into a deer for his dogs to devour, Jorge Grau's modernist retelling resets the story to contemporary Spain, where a fisherman – played by Martin LaSalle, star of Bresson's Pickpocket – follows an enchanting, flirtatious stranger into the city.

Grau, perhaps best known for his lurid 70s horror masterpieces The Legend of Blood Castle (1972) and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), cultivates some of the evocative atmosphere of those later films here, delivering an enigmatic, sometimes oblique piece that explores desire, social class and the alienation of modern life.

"In many ways [Grau's] most ambitious undertaking." – International Film Festival Rotterdam

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