Penelope

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 2006, 101 min
EP – European premiere
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

One of Penelope’s distant ancestors once enraged a local witch and, in return, she laid a curse on the noble Wilhern family: their first female offspring would walk the earth with a pig’s snout. And there would be only one way to break the evil spell - a similarly high-born young man would have to fall in love with the girl and take her as his wife. Up to this point we recognise the popular fairytale motif - a prince turned into a frog or a princess in a donkey’s skin, who can only be freed by true love. Penelope’s family sets up ceremonial courtships, but the suitors always run away in terror, one of them even wants to scandalise Penelope by putting her in a magazine. And what about Penelope? Down but not out, she decides she is not going to wait around until she finds a groom but is going to leave and learn to live with her misfortune. “We call this the anti-Barbie movie. Today everyone’s so concerned with how they look, it’s interesting to develop a story where a young woman overcomes the prejudice and proves her strength of character and eventually triumphs, finds herself and finds true love,“ say the producers of the film.

About the director

Mark Palansky was born in Toronto but grew up in Los Angeles. He studied art and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Palansky works with sculpture, photography, and design, and added film to his creative talents at the end of the 1990s. In 1999 he made his first short film, Shutter, about a pregnant photographer whose life is saved by her own strange visions. He debuted as a feature-film director with the modern fairy tale about an ugly girl named Penelope, the important moral message of which he handles with humour, playfulness, and invention.