Disney and Dali debut at Tate

A short film that the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali began working on with Walt Disney in the Forties will premiere in Britain as part of a new exhibition at Tate Modern.

The film, entitled Destino, was never completed in the artist's lifetime because the Disney studio ran out of cash.

But it was finished four years ago by Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt Disney, working with the late John Hench, one of the original collaborators on the project.

The seven-minute work will be shown at Tate Modern as a part of a new Dali exhibition, which brings together more than 100 works and opens on Friday. Highlights will include Dali's painting The Persistence Of Memory, which has not been shown in Britain for 27 years.

But the focus will be on Dali's films. These include two works with Luis Bunuel in 1929-30, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, as well as a sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound.

Curator Matthew Gayle said Dali was among the first generation of artists for whom film was a formative influence.

"He was an artist who was hungry for new ideas from all sorts of different sources and I think film was one that he was immersed in from a very early," he said. "It was embedded deep in his imagination."

Many of the images associated with Dali's paintings and drawings, such as eyeballs and melting timepieces, also occur in his films.

The origins of Destino date back to 1945 when Walt Disney met Dali at a dinner. Each admired the other's work and decided to collaborate. Dali spent eight months working on the film and produced drawings, paintings and story-boards. But the project came to halt because of financial difficulties at the studio - although Disney and Dali remained friends for life.

Roy Disney will unveil the work in London today. He said it had always been an important and prestigious part of the studio's legacy.