Destino & Spellbound

This event is part of our Surrealism on Film season and will be introduced by David Nixon, Head of Cinema at DCA. 

In 1945, Salvador Dalí collaborated with Disney studio artist John Hench to storyboard a new surrealist animation called Destino, but production was halted when Walt Disney Studios fell into financial difficulty due to the World War. The project remained dormant until 1999 when the nephew of Walt Disney, Roy E. Disney, unearthed the project and decided to bring it back to life. The 7-minute short animation was finally finished in 2003 by French animator Dominique Monféryin and we’re screening it before Hitchcock’s Spellbound. 

Also in 1945, Dalí designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. In the film, Ingrid Bergman plays a psychoanalyst at a Vermont mental hospital who falls for Gregory Peck’s new director. She embarks on a relationship with him, but a shocking discovery sees her attempt to uncover his past, one that includes murder – thus placing her own life in danger. Hitchcock’s classic psychological thriller, featuring Dalí’s audacious and surreal dream sequences, revels in the twists, turns and thrills that audiences have come to expect from the ‘Master of Suspense’.