Issue 14

Time to don your tin foil suit and X-Ray glasses: the Sci-Fi London Film Festival is back for its 7th edition! Read our preview and find out what’s in store – time travel and superheroes for sure but expect strange fantasies and visionary nightmares too. This month also sees the release of Park Chan-wook’s latest, I’m a Cyborg, a sort-of-sci-fi, wonderfully bizarre bonbon of a film. And we have an interview with Park Chan-wook – oh yes, we talked to Mister Vengeance himself.

Back on earth, it’s all politics and fanatics: we have a review of the sharply funny animated film Persepolis, which chronicles recent Iranian history through the eyes of an opinionated young girl, as well as an interview with the film’s brilliantly entertaining director Marjane Satrapi. The murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s political thriller The Sixth of May, which focuses on the real-life assassination of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, is also out on DVD. And there’s more mind-boggling political conspiracy on offer with Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, showing at The East End Film Festival.

Elsewhere, we have reviews of Michael Haneke’s US remake of his own Funny Games, Belgian shocker Ex-Drummer (our rock’n’roll film of the month), a double shot of exhilarating ‘pinky violence’ with Sex and Fury and Female Yakuza, as well as two unsurpassable classics, Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Antonioni’s La Notte. We also talked to French provocatrice Catherine Breillat, whose latest, The Last Mistress, is released this month. And we report on the Berlinale Film Festival and on the first Midnight Movies night at the Curzon Cinema, and what a hoot that was!

In the Short Cuts, we have a profile of director Sean Conway while CJ Magnet muses on the similarities between Black Orpheus and Braveheart in The Last Word.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team