With the selection of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Venice maintains its key role in the international circulation of Czech film heritage.  In recent editions, the festival has provided high-visibility launches for restorations by Czech Národní filmový archív, ranging from Miloš Forman’s Black Peter and Gustav Machatý’s Ecstasy to Karel Kachyňa’s politically charged drama The Ear. This has made Venice Classics an important showcase for individual restorations, as well as the sustained effort to position Czech and Czechoslovak cinema within the global canon.

With Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the focus shifts to a title whose afterlife has been driven as much by its lasting influence on music, fashion, and visual culture as by its discovery by cinephiles. The work has built a following across audiences and platforms, from repertory cinema to boutique home entertainment to horror culture. It can be programmed as New Wave cinema, Gothic fantasy, feminist coming-of-age story, folk horror, or audiovisual cult classic. This unusual versatility allows the film to continue reaching new audiences across formats, territories, and generations.

Produced in 1969 and released in 1970, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was one of the last major works to emerge from the relatively liberal environment that opened the door for the Czechoslovak New Wave. Its arrival coincided with the onset of normalization and the reimposing of political and institutional controls on filmmaking in communist Czechoslovakia. Yet its approach is far removed from the observational realism or overt political allegory often associated with the movement. Drawing on Vítězslav Nezval’s 1932 novel of the same name, Jireš and co-screenwriter Ester Krumbachová produced a highly stylized coming-of-age narrative that sits at the intersection of Gothic horror, fairy tale, surrealism, and erotic fantasy.

Valerie is a 13-year-old girl whose ordered existence with her strict grandmother transforms into an unstable world of vampires, clerics, doubles, and shifting family identities. Her attempt to uncover the secret of her origins leads her on a journey through sexual awakening, religious repression, and predatory authority figures. Rather than resolving these elements through conventional narrative causality, the story employs the associative structure of a dream. Characters change roles and identities, innocence coexists with desire, and everyday spaces turn without warning into sites of ritual, persecution or transformation. This formal ambiguity is central to the film’s longevity.

For contemporary audiences and programmers, the restoration is also an opportunity to foreground the authorship of Ester Krumbachová. One of the defining creative figures of postwar Czechoslovak cinema, Krumbachová wrote the original screenplay for Valerie, as well as doing the costume and production design. The work’s symbolism—white garments, flowers, lace, religious icons, masks, and ceremonial tableaux—is embedded in its storytelling and mise-en-scène alike. Krumbachová’s designs, together with Jan Čuřík’s color cinematography, construct a world whose visual seductiveness is inseparable from its sense of threat.

The score, by Luboš Fišer, is equally important to the film’s international reputation. Combining choral textures, children’s voices, and recurring melodic motifs, it moves between the sacred, the playful, and the ominous. The soundtrack’s circulation beyond the film itself has contributed to the movie’s cult reputation. Krumbachová’s renewed recognition has also placed Valerie and Her Week of Wonders at the center of a broader reassessment of creative labor in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Her collaborations with filmmakers Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, and Karel Kachyňa shaped the visual identities of several of the period’s defining works.

Looking back at other Czechoslovak and Czech cinematic works introduced to international viewers by way of Venice, the restored Black Peter, Forman’s 1963 feature debut, screened in Venice Classics in 2017, bringing renewed attention to the director’s early projects made in Czech and their influence on European and American filmmaking. In 2019, the restoration of Machatý’s Ecstasy received the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film, reasserting the significance of a title that made its mark on history in the 1930s with its formal innovation and controversial representation of women’s sexuality.

Kachyňa’s The Ear—a study of surveillance, political fear, and marital disintegration, completed in 1970 but withheld from release for two decades—was presented in Venice Classics in 2022, demonstrating how restoration can return a suppressed film to screens, festivals, and critical debate. Other Venice presentations, including the restored A Bagful of Fleas by Chytilová and Karel Steklý’s The Strike, have highlighted the value of the Czech film heritage, from the experimentation of the New Wave to films connected directly with the festival’s own history. The Strike won Venice’s top prize in 1947, while Machatý was honored for Ecstasy at Venice in 1934.

In the Czech catalog, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders occupies an unusually flexible position. It carries the prestige of the Czechoslovak New Wave while retaining strong genre elements and a recognizable visual identity. The film also speaks directly to the current industry interest in genre hybridity and works that destabilize the traditional distinctions between art cinema and fantasy. Its adolescent point of view, critique of institutional and sexual authority, and refusal to impose a fixed interpretation give it contemporary resonance without detaching it from its historical context. More than five decades after its completion, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders remains a singular demonstration of Czech cinema’s ability to unite formal invention, genre appeal, and enduring visual influence.