Nadja (4K Restoration, Director’s Cut)

“This triumph of low-budget filmmaking will shimmer for a week at Brooklyn Academy of Music.… At once literal and fantastic, often droll and at times rhapsodic… Almereyda’s use of desolate downtown locations is reminiscent of Scorsese’s in After Hours.” — J. Hoberman, The New York Times

Merging elements from ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ (1936) with André Breton’s surrealist novel ‘Nadja’ (1928), and fusing shimmering black-and-white 35mm with hallucinatory Pixelvision video, Michael Almereyda’s (‘Tesla,’ ‘Experimenter,’ ‘Hamlet’) acclaimed cult film centers on New York-based vampire Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) as she draws close to her twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris) following their father’s death at the hands of Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda). Edgar’s private nurse (Suzy Amis), Van Helsing’s nephew Jim (Martin Donovan), and Jim’s wife (Galaxy Craze) are entangled in the story as the vampire killer pursues ‘the fiend’ from Manhattan to Transylvania.

Director: Michael Almereyda. Producer: Mary Sweeney, Amy Hobby, David Lynch. Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Peter Fonda, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Galaxy Craze & Karl Geary.

Michael Almereyda on Nadja, Peter Fonda, David Lynch’s Fantômas, and Zero K – Nick Newman, Film Stage

Restoration Info:
The original Director’s Cut of NADJA was digitally restored by Arbelos and Grasshopper Film from the only extant element, the 35mm answer print—the version of the film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1994, three minutes longer than the commercial release. Laboratory services by OCN Labs, Five Seventy Films, Ben Gilbert Films, David Ferron and Blackhawk Films. Special thanks to Michael Almereyda and Absurda.

“The most stylish vampire movie of the 1990s… simultaneously funny and sexy… a deadpan, bloodsucking adventure that proved you didn’t need a big budget if you had attitude, a cool setting, and an aesthetic point of view.”
— Jordan Hoffman, Vanity Fair

“Mesmerizing. Michael Almereyda’s impossibly hip 1994 film.”
— Alison Wilmore, New York Magazine