Description

We couldn’t be more excited to introduce you to this astonishing, 13-years-in-the-making independent masterwork - written, produced, animated, and directed by a single woman, who also built every character and set. Bear with us as we attempt to describe the indescribable: One of the first images to appear is a shot of a cake, the film’s title written out in icing. A knife comes into frame and cuts out a slice, letting loose several insects which emerge from beneath the sweet sugar treat, establishing the soul of what is to come. Our story proper opens with a group of furry, beaked creatures who live in an oak tree and create a doll in the image of a woman. They take an egg from a nearby stream, place it in the doll’s womb, and hang her in the oak as if crucified. While they sleep, a trio of red-eyed bourgeois mice arrive via a turtle-drawn carriage, steal the doll and take her home with them. The beaked creatures embark on a hallucinatory journey in search of their cherished doll figure, as the mice get drunk on blood tea. Sunflowers sprout with skulls in their centres. Things begin to get strange.

Intrigued? You damn well better be, because this dark, hypnotic fairy tale for adults is a triumph of creative passion as an all-consuming force of nature, brimming with wonder, twisting with madness and hitting its eccentric marks with a uniqueness seldom seen in modern film. In 1993, Christiane Cegavske, known in the indie-film world for her animated sequences in Asia Argento’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, began building characters at home, her story evolving and mutating with each new creation ("they help to finish the script"). At the time, she expected Blood Tea And Red String to be a Super 8 short. Several years later, she lived in a warehouse and was building the film’s elaborate sets amongst the trash cans and garage works with which she shared space. It’s there that she exposed Blood Tea’s first rolls of film. Armed with little else than a Bolex camera and credit card, she began a production journey that would take her literally as many years as Fantasia has existed before seeing her creation to completion. The stunning end result of Cegavske’s many years of obsession is an engrossing headtrip that is equally touching, disturbing adorable and gruesome. It is a poetic, dialogue-free aria of unrestrained imagination.

—Mitch Davis

"A David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain... as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet" – Dennis Harvey, VARIETY

"A stunning example of animated art" – Rain, SFIST.COM

Website

http://christianecegavske.com/BloodTeaRe

Credits

Director: Christiane Cegavske
Screenplay: Christiane Cegavske
Producers: Christiane Cegavske, Andre Boutilier, Composer : Mark Growden
Distributor: Cinema Epoch