U.S., 2021, 91 min, 4K DCP, Dir. Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley, Not Rated, English, Music Box Films


Strawberry Mansion

Friday, 4/1 to Thursday, 4/7

"It's a candy-colored storybook that wants nothing more than to put you at ease." —The Hollywood Reporter

"Even as [it] stretches its flights of fancy past breaking point, there are pleasures to be taken from the blithe, handmade execution of its vision, throwing everything in the pot from creaky animal puppetry to 8-bit effects." —Variety

In 2035, our dreams are no longer our own – they're infused with product placement and auditors assess unpaid taxes on our most private reveries. Beleaguered taxman James Preble (Kentucker Audley) arrives at a run-down house in the countryside for a routine audit and encounters Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller), a lifelong dreamer who remains resolutely analog, circumventing the surveillance state with VHS tapes and homemade headgear. As Preble works his way through Bella's archive of the unconscious, he begins to fall in love with visions of her younger self (Grace Glowicki). But all is not well in dreamland as dangerous family secrets and a rogue's gallery of blue demons and fried chicken pitchmen threaten to set the lovers' paradise ablaze. Can Preble and Bella escape from the modern, monetized dreamscape and find refuge in Strawberry Mansion?

Strawberry Mansion directors Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley describe their movie like getting lost in a strange dream: "Sometimes you don't know where you are, or where you're headed. The thread you thought you were following disappears behind your back. You turn around and it's nowhere. The film is inspired in some ways by the fantasy movies we saw as kids in the 80's; hopefully, there's a childlike exuberance that can be felt throughout this unpredictable journey, as tension mounts from invented stakes, creating a world all its own."


Tickets to these screenings are $12.75 and under. Cinema members pay only $8.



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