Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" screens at the Paradise Cinema, Monday

Věra Chytilová's Czech new wave gem Daisies gets a rare Toronto screening at the Paradise Theatre on Monday at 6 pm. 

Here's the scoop...

The Paradise Theatre, as part of their ongoing Material Girls series, presents a delightful satire/protest of materialism courtesy of the Czech New Wave. It's Věra Chytilová's joyously radical DAISIES.

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form. The quirky original score by Jiří Šust & Jiří Šlitr is also quite intriguing on it's own. 

Věra Chytilová's Daisies (Czech Republic, 1966)

Paradise Theatre (1006c Bloor St. West)

Monday, September 16th at 6 pm (doors at 5:30 pm). 

General Admission $12.50 | Student/Senior (with valid ID) $10.00 + HST/eventbrite fees

Get tickets here. Door tickets are available for purchase on the day of screening. Watch the trailer followed by a discussion of filmmaker Věra Chytilová's work and an audio clip from the soundtrack below.