From the seminal German filmmaker and visual artist Ulrike Ottinger comes THE BLOOD COUNTESS, a sumptuous adventure tale and bizarro black comedy soaked in crimson and pulsing with ancient bloodlust. Decades after her mysterious disappearance, the Blood Countess reemerges in modern-day Vienna, where she reunites with her devoted underling, Hermione, to track down a dangerous book with the power to destroy all evil—including all vampires such as themselves. The duo embarks on a scavenger hunt through the city’s magnificent historic sites and conscript the countess’s melancholic nephew—a vegetarian vampire named Bubi—and his psychotherapist as they expand their search to Bohemia. Meanwhile, a pair of vampirologists and a police inspector remain hot on their trail. Morbidly funny and dazzlingly decadent, THE BLOOD COUNTESS is a reinvention of the vampire myth from one of world cinema’s most prodigious minds.
Born in 1942, the iconoclastic filmmaker and visual artistUlrike Ottingeris perhaps best known as the most prominent female member of the New German Cinema, the movement that gave rise to directors like Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. Ottinger, however, stands in a league of her own. The rare lesbian auteur whose body of work spans across six decades, Ottinger first made her mark with a series of gender-bending fantasias, beginning with her debutMadame X: An Absolute Ruler(1977), about a motley crew of women pirates, followed byTicket of No Return(1979), a feminist parable about self-destruction. Serving frequently as her own costume and production designer, Ottinger has created a riotous fictional cosmos that embraces spectacle and artifice as a powerful cinematic truth. Deliciously flamboyant films likeFreak Orlando(1981)andDorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press(1984) stage extravagant tableaux vivants that reimagine cultural archetypes through a provocatively queer lens.
Over the past thirty years, Ottinger has shifted her focus to nonfiction, allowing her wandering spirit and fascination with the traditional practices and rituals of other cultures to dictate her choices in subject matter. Her epic ethnographic documentaries (Taiga,1992;The Korean Wedding Chest,2009;Under Snow,2011) and intimate travelogues (Paris Calligrammes,2020) explore the history and transformations of everywhere from Mongolia to the arctic seas. With THE BLOOD COUNTESS, Ottinger returns to the realm of fiction, showcasing her baroque and experimental approach to worldbuilding in a macabre comedy that joins ancient legend with modern times.