This free cinema program presents beloved classics alongside contemporary retellings. Fairy tales have always been a means of speaking truth to power; challenging injustice and providing hope.

This program highlights how filmmakers have innovated on older stories to resonate in different times and contexts.

The program tells these tales across five thematic strands, each strand exploring how fairy tales inform ideas of transformation, identity, and wonder.

‘Maiden, Mother, Crone’ looks at how fairy tales are used to interrogate societal expectations about age and gender, particularly the way in which women progress through life stages; ‘Happy Endings’ considers ideas of the good life and how our desires are shaped by our community ideals and economic circumstances; ‘Off the Path’ celebrates the adventurous nature of fairy tales and how landscapes have been filmed to express the threshold between being lost and finding oneself; ‘Becoming Other’ looks at how archetypal tropes of transformation in fairy tales are used by filmmakers to connect with questions of identity; and finally ‘Storytellers’ explores how film, as a relatively new narrative medium, has engaged with older oral and literary forms, making the wondrous and impossible visible.

The program features over 40 films, including the mesmeric special event screenings of silent films.

Fairy Tales: Truth, Power and Enchantment
2 December 2023 – 28 April 2024
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au