The Saragossa Manuscript
At the height of the Napoleonic wars, a Polish soldier seeks refuge in a deserted house in the Spanish town of Saragossa, and discovers a mysterious manuscript written in a language he doesn’t speak. When enemy Spanish officers arrive to arrest him, one of the soldiers realises that the book appears to tell the story of his grandfather, Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski, Ashes and Diamonds), and his surreal, mystical adventures in the region several decades before. He starts to translate the text for the Polish soldier, and so begins a time-shifting, genre-hopping, ouroboros-like epic narrative, one that blends the gothic, quixotic and erotic, and in the process interrogates the very nature of storytelling itself. Championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, The Saragossa Manuscript has grown in status since its initial release from a cult oddity to a film widely regarded as one of greatest ever produced in Poland, and a work that cemented Wojciech Has as one of European cinema’s most visionary and idiosyncratic directors.
4K UHD & BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K restoration from the original camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision HDR
- 4K UHD and Blu-ray presentation of the feature; world premiere on 4K UHD
- Uncompressed mono PCM audio
- The Saragossa Labyrinth - new visual essay on the cinema of Wojciech Has and The Saragossa Manuscript by Polish film expert Michael Brooke
- Saragossa - archival making-of documentary made for Polish television on The Saragossa Manuscript, featuring Wojciech Has, cinematographer Mieczyslaw Jahoda, production designer Jerzy Skarżyński, and assistant director Barbara Sass-Zdort (1998, 29 mins)
- Newly improved English subtitle translation
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
- Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by author David Hering and archival writing by Annette Insdorf
- Limited edition of 5000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings
