Frederic is a maternally-dominated young man who by chance is awakened to a dormant childhood memory while attending the launch party of a new perfume. A chateau pictured in the perfume’s poster reminds him of a night, long ago, when he was lost and a beautiful young woman came out of nowhere to protect him through the night. Later, the woman—unaged—magically appears and beckons to him, and Frederic finds his way back to the chateau and to her, uncovering some dark secrets about his family’s past along the way.

Lips of Blood was French horror-erotica auteur Jean Rollin’s favorite of his own films and it contains many of his signature elements: crumbling seaside ruins, bloodthirsty vampires, poetically haunting cinematography and suspenseful intrigue. Of all his films, it perhaps best transcends his tendencies toward the poetical and arcane, while remaining at the same time true to his most personal, recurring obsessions: childhood, nostalgia, lost love, romantic quests, the cinema, obsolescence. Aided by a young Jean-François Robin, whose later talents as a cinematographer would spice up films in the 1980s by Jacques Demy and Andrzej Żuławski, as well as the Cinéma du look classic Betty Blue, Lips of Blood is one of Rollin’s most beautiful works.

Selected by Artist in Profile Sophia-Al Maria, who will introduce the film