Movies: Stephen Quay

A man journeys by rail to a nameless sanatorium where his father has recently died. Once there, time loses its linearity and he finds himself in a world that appears both strange and strangely familiar....

Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale....

In 2015, Christopher Nolan curated a selection of short films by the surrealist animators the Quay Brothers to be distributed as a touring 35mm presentation. The three films—"In Absentia" (2000), "The Comb" (1991) and "Street of Crocodiles" (1986)—we...

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself....

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under...

A documentary on the subject of the collections of books, instruments and medical anomalies at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mutter Museum housed there. This short film represents the first to be made by the internationally recogn...

Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a be...

Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society....

The exploration of the effects of an unexpected catastrophe, known as VUE (violent unknown event) through the bios of 92 survivors....

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The pr...

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities....

Guy Maddin, who has been nicknamed the Canadian David Lynch, is undoubtedly one of the last remaining Magi of cinema. Despite living in the middle of the digital age, this heretical director hailing from the snowy plains of Canada has spent 25 years ...

A farming family and their livestock dance during a much-needed downpour in this Quay Brothers short made for Sesame Street....

Afraid of losing his wife, Horatio creates a replica he calls Hortensia. But things don't go as planned... Shot on 35mm and propelled by an impressive score by Michèle Bokanowski, the Quay Brothers evoke an intense drama of jealousy, betrayal and mu...

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive....

"Maska" is the latest animated film of Quay brothers, directors and puppet animators, with the music composed by Krzysztof Penderecki. The film is an adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s short story of the same title. The action of “Maska” is set in a techn...

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens,...

In a realm beyond the senses, plants interact with surreal cinematography to chart the course of our character: an entity said to embody the life and work of Felisberto Hernández, Uruguayan father of magical realism. Through this journey, we are conf...

This short documentary documents the making of the film the Quay Brothers shot at, and on the subject of, the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the first film the internationally-known filmmakers have made in the U.S.A....

In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count - Jan Potocki - in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki's music and Brothers Quay's imaginary animation....