Nearly 20 years since their last animated feature, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), graced screens, twin filmmakers The Brothers Quay — Stephen and Timothy Quay — have premiered a new full-length feat at the Venice International Film Festival. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is a stop-motion/live-action feature inspired by the works of Jewish-Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. The Quays’ acclaimed short Street of Crocodiles (1986) was also based on a story by Schulz.
The film is a co-production between studios in the U.K., Poland and Germany, written and directed by the Quays. Producing studios are Koninck Studios Galicia (producer Lucie Conrad) and IKH Pictures Production (Izabella Kiszka-Hoflik); co-producers are The Match Factory (handling worldwide sales) and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute; presented by the British Film Institute in association with Telewizja Polska with the support of Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg.
Synopsis: A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realize that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.
“In our film, the Sanatorium is one vast, mysterious realm that Józef tries to navigate and ends up submitting to,” the brothers told Variety in a new interview. “He will find his father, then lose him in a dream. Józef himself will become multiple; one will die, another will be condemned to wander endlessly the Sanatorium’s corridors and the last one will board the very same train he arrived on.”
The Quays pulled from the texts of Schulz’s Sanatorium, The Comet and The Republic of Dreams. They also sought to maintain the author’s voice by producing the film entirely in the Polish language. The cast features Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopańska, Andrzej Kłak, Zenaida Yanowsky and Allison Bell.
“This new feature is secretly, if not entirely, dedicated to his ‘J’: Józefina Szelińska, whom [Schulz had] been engaged to but never married,” the filmmakers share in the interview. “Beyond all his slow accumulations of stories was the inevitable ruthless end to his life in that little town of Drohobycz that he hardly ever left. That grief we hold to this day and still see in every sentence of his work.”
Schulz was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942 while walking through the Drohobycz Ghetto; the town is located in modern-day Ukraine.
