House of the Sleeping Beauties

Based on the beautifully strange novella by Yasunari Kawabata, writer-director-actor Vadim Glowna has crafted a beautiful, macabre thriller about loneliness, sex, eroticism and mortality. Featuring performances by Glowna, the Academy Award-winning Maximilian Schell, Angela Winkler, and a cast of young beauties, House of the Sleeping Beauties premiered at Cannes in 2007.

Edmond (Glowna), a lonely widower in his late sixties living in Berlin, learns from old friend Kogi (Schell) about a secret establishment where one can pay to lie alongside beautiful, sleeping young women. The girls – who move, stretch, roll over and dream but never awaken – are cared for by Madame (Winkler), the enigmatic director of the house.

Seduced and enchanted by their peculiar, unconscious tenderness, Edmond visits the sleeping beauties with greater and greater frequency, prompting him to probe the boundaries of his own morality and to re-visit long repressed memories, including the deaths of his wife and daughter. When Edmond inadvertently observes Madame and her cohorts smuggling a corpse from the premises, a newly ignited desire to unravel the bizarre activities conflicts with his addiction to the juvenile innocence and tender embrace of those who inhabit it. –First Run Features