CSS Winter Film Series #1: Little Otik

The Canterbury Socialist Society warmly invites any and all to the first in its four-part winter film series in which Sionainn Byrnes introduces the Czech film Otesánek by Jan Švankmajer. Based on the eponymous fairy tale by Karel Jaromír Erben, Otesánek depicts an infertile couple who, having succeeded in loving a tree stump to life, must consequently come up against its insatiable hunger. Sionainn situates the film in terms of post-communism, consumerism, and desire and argues for the roles of the fairy and folk tale and surrealist traditions in sustaining working-class consciousness.