Goethe-Institute Film Screening with Live Music: The Adventures of Prince Ahmed

Fairy Tale Weeks at the Goethe-Institut in the United Arab Emirates invites you to rediscover some of the fairy tale classics of the Brothers Grimm. Over the next few months, they will be screening fairy tale movies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. You can see the full line-up here (although as I am writing this, I can't see an actual schedule on their site).

To launch Fairy Tale Weeks, the Goethe-Institut will be screening The Adventures of Prince Ahmed by Lotte Reiniger, a German animated silent film from 1926 which will be accompanied with live music by KlangEssenz. The original film music has been rearranged for the ensemble so that the five musicians invite you to experience a unique combination of classic cinema and live music.

The screenings will happen over two days, on 19th November in Dubai at The Fridge and on 20th November in Abu Dhabi in the Abu Dhabi Theatre. The film will be shown with English subtitles.

About The Adventures of Prince Ahmed

Lotte Reiniger created the first full-length feature animated film in the history of the cinema. The film is based on stories of "Thousand and One Nights" and tells the story of the young prince Ahmed who has to overcome various difficulties before he can marry his princess. Prince Ahmed meets evil sorcerers and amazing magic horses, powerful witches and beautiful princesses, jinni’s and demons on his adventurous search for love and freedom.
The technical and aesthetic aspects of this film genre had already been developed to cinematic perfection in the 1920s. Her style is similar to traditional Chinese shadow plays in combination with the technical filming techniques. It took three years to finish the movie, "as for such a movie 24 pictures have to be recorded for every second" (Lotte Reiniger, 1972).
In 1989 restoration work on The Adventures of Prince Ahmed was completed by the German Film Museum in Frankfurt with the support of the London film producer Louis Hagen of Primrose Productions, whose father had founded the Comenius-Film company in the 20s and had financed the three-year film project. For the 16 mm print, the lost German titles inserted in the film were reconstructed in contemporary script, and a new color version was made according to the instructions received from Lotte Reiniger.