Carbon Arc: Nadja (4k Restoration)

Vampire Nadja launches a feud against her father Dracula’s murderer, starting with seducing his daughter. A shimmering restoration of a cult gem brought to you by Carbon Arc Cinema!

“We have an allergy to sunlight. My whole family.” Merging elements from Dracula’s Daughter (1936) with André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (1928), and fusing shimmering black-and-white 35mm with hallucinatory Pixelvision video, Michael Almereyda’s acclaimed cult film centers on New York-based vampire Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) as she draws close to her twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris) following their father’s death at the hands of Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda). Edgar’s private nurse (Suzy Amis), Van Helsing’s nephew Jim (Martin Donovan), and Jim’s wife (Galaxy Craze) are entangled in the story as the vampire killer pursues “the fiend” from Manhattan to Transylvania.

Executive produced by David Lynch, this original director’s cut of Nadja was digitally from the only extant element, the 35mm answer print. Director Almereyda on the birth of Nadja: “David and Mary understood that the movie, following Breton’s lead, was intended as a kind of collage, in the tradition of a surrealist exquisite corpse, though we were equally indebted to Roger Corman, shooting fast and cheap and fitting the story into just a few locations. Low as the budget was, investors faded out when we lost a particular cast member a few weeks away from our start date, and David bravely decided to pay for the film out of his own pocket—an act of generosity that still startles me.”