The Great Indomitable Circus prepares the premiere of their new performance ‘Rights of Man’. Setting up tent in a sleepy northern Spanish town, they devise changes in the style of their show. But their days become mired in meandering vaudevillian arguments, analysing the grandeur of the landscape, the simplicity of the native architecture or the quality of each other’s performances. After much back-and-forth, they end up sticking to their original script.

Introduction by filmmaker Juan Rodrigañez

The film will be preceded by the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition award presentation

When the Cat Comes is one of the more quietly subversive films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and its visual flair, storybook fantasy and absurd humour make it fun for viewers of all ages. The film won the Cannes Special Jury Prize in 1963 thanks to the winning combination of director Vojtěch Jasný, writer Jirí Brdecka—known for his collaborations with animator Jirí Trnka—and lead actor Jan Werich, writing his own dialogue in the dual role of Comrade Oliva and the Magician.

A woman is paid a surprise visit by her long-forgotten classmate, who needs her advice: should he choose a wife or a lover? An outrageously burlesque mise-en-scène is repeated many times over, each in a different setting and performed by new actors. While the viewer doesn’t immediately recognise this, the scenes are screen tests with various actors. Towards the finale, Muratova employs a trick: the black-and-white images are disrupted and the film continues in colour. In the screening room, the producer and a potential investor, a sugar magnate, discuss the material of the uncompleted film. The director has died and there is no money to finish the movie. Muratova asked the big stars of Russian cinema and stage (including Renata Litvinova, Oleg Tabakov and Alla Demidova) as well as the amateur actors from her previous films to collaborate on Eternal Homecoming, exploring the possibilities of aesthetic transformations between past and present.