Fifty years after his death, Aleksandr Arturovich Rou remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed “King of the Fairy Tales” and “The Main Storyteller of the Country”, he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972. In the West, by contrast, Rou’s work remains little known. Few of his films received theatrical distribution in Britain or America,…