Karel Zeman's A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (1974)— U.S. Restoration Premiere!

7th House is proud to present the U.S. premiere of the dazzling new 4K restoration of Karel Zeman’s rarely-seen A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (1974)—returning to a Los Angeles screen for the first time in a quarter-century!

Presented in conjunction with Through Mirrors, Webs, and Woods, PRS’s month-long September journey through fairy tales, folklore, and the fantastical, A Thousand and One Nights is an enchanting voyage into the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor—and a return to pure animation for renowned Czech fantasist Karel Zeman. Across a succession of strange and magical adventures, the young Sinbad sails through faraway lands, encountering giants, a magnetic mountain, the Sea Sultan, a flying carpet, a magical djinn, and other wonders along the way. Drawing inspiration from the intricate beauty of Persian miniatures, Zeman conjures the feeling of an elaborately illustrated storybook coming wondrously to life.

For Zeman, this return to animation was also something of a homecoming. He began his filmmaking career in the 1940s as an animator, creating, among other early works, a popular series of shorts starring the mustachioed everyman Mr. Prokouk. Over the following decades, he became internationally celebrated for a remarkable form of cinematic illusion all his own, combining live action with animation, puppetry, intricately designed sets, and a seemingly bottomless bag of handmade special effects. In films like Invention for Destruction and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, Zeman transformed the illustrated worlds of Jules Verne and Gustave Doré into moving, three-dimensional fantasies unlike almost anything else in cinema.

A Thousand and One Nights marked Zeman’s return to fully animated filmmaking after nearly two decades spent exploring the possibilities of live action and animation together. Beginning in 1971 as a cycle of seven Sinbad shorts, the project grew over the next several years into the feature-length work presented here, with Zeman employing cutout animation alongside drawn and dimensional elements to create its richly patterned, intricately detailed world.

And now, more than half a century later, that world has been painstakingly brought back to its original splendor. Completed in 2025, the film’s new 4K restoration involved the manual retouching of an astonishing 130,000 individual frames, with Zeman’s daughter and longtime collaborator Ludmila Zemanová among the expert group overseeing the work. The first of four Zeman features newly restored through an ongoing project spearheaded by the Karel Zeman Museum, this long-overdue revival returns one of the filmmaker’s lesser-seen works to the big screen, revealing anew the intricate beauty and one-of-a-kind visual imagination of Zeman’s animated world.

Don't miss this rare chance to experience Zeman in his fully animated form—and to welcome this long-absent wonder back to a Los Angeles screen for the first time in twenty-five years!

Dir. Karel Zeman, 1974, 91 mins, Czechia, Czech w/ English subtitles, Unrated (Suitable for All Ages), Digital.

Special thanks

Tickets: $12 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.