WILLOW SPRINGS (Church of Film)

Shot on a shoestring budget in the middle of the Californian desert, Werner Schroeter’s American outing follows in a dreamlike trance the murderous North Star Cult, a small commune of women who have retreated from society and into a string of abandoned buildings along the highway. There they lure men in and sacrifice them.

With entrancing desert photography, and a blend of old pop and blues mixing indiscriminately with opera records, WILLOW SPRINGS is a haunting, bizarre, morbid and darkly comical piece of German New Cinema from one of the movement’s most provocative queer icons.