One of the French cinema’s supreme masterpieces, Jean Cocteau’s astonishing re-working of the Orpheus myth returns with a stunning new digital restoration.

Orphée (Cocteau favourite Jean Marais) is a young Left Bank poet, who is lost for inspiration as he frequents the sidewalk cafes of a Paris only recently freed from the dark cloud of Occupation. Eurydice (Marie Déa) is Orphée’s pregnant wife, whilst the Princess of Death (Maria Casarès), is a mysterious black-clad figure with whom Orphée falls in love. But after the Princess has the neglected Eurydice killed, Orphée — grief-stricken, but still obsessed with the Princess — passes through the looking glass portal into the land of the dead in an attempt to rescue his wife from the Underworld.

With its unforgettable imagery - the dissolving mirror through which characters pass into the next world, the leather-clad, death-dealing motorcyclists, and Cocteau’s magical special effects, Orphée is a work of haunting beauty. Dreamlike, poetic and endlessly inventive, it rightly stands as Cocteau’s most widely celebrated work of cinema.

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