Still from Let the Right One In

Edinburgh International Film Festival

18-29 June 2008

EIFF website

Separated from the major annual Edinburgh Festival pandemonium for the first time ever, this year’s 62nd film festival wished to establish a fresher, stronger, edgier identity, exploring the nooks and crannies of new movie-making and bringing unusual treasures to its enthusiastic local and international audience. Unfortunately though, this was not a year of major cinematic breakthroughs and in spite of the promising programme notes, too many of the films turned out to be mediocre.

Without doubt, the pick of the festival was Swedish director Tomas Alfredsson’s excellent Let the Right One In (L Ã¥t den rätte komma in), an intelligent, well-paced vampire movie, which deservedly won the top award for best narrative feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Impressively handling familiar material and giving it a fresh spin, it has the gruesome feel and bizarre beauty of an eccentric horror fantasy, but also delivers plenty of emotionally charged drama and wry humour. Andersson slowly charts the blossoming friendship between troubled 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli through a series of poignant and near-surreal attempts at bonding that are in turn gentle and disturbing. Superb cinematography and mesmerising performances by the two adolescent lead actors (K Ã¥re Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson) make it a film to treasure.

Another Nordic find was Ole Bornedal’s Just Another Love Story, a grippingly complex and stylish contemporary noir thriller from Denmark, in which a police photographer finds himself emotionally entangled with a comatose young woman injured in a car accident that also involved himself and his family. Developing into an obscene, twisted romance, the story remains powerful and well-calibrated throughout, turning into a shocking, nerve-racking riddle played out with a brutal relish for the grotesque in the final part.

One of the festival’s most enjoyable films was the truly unsettling sci-fi narrative Sleep Dealer by young Mexican director Alex Rivera. Following in the giant steps of The Matrix or Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, this striking and hugely inventive debut feature playfully addresses the idea of humans retreating from objective reality by means of computer software that connects to their conscious minds through metallic ports inserted into their bodies. In Rivera’s futuristic fantasy, however, people use the new technology not so much to experience virtual thrills as to earn their living by controlling robots performing manual work in the US. The riveting story is served well by consistently excellent performances and is visually remarkably polished. Rivera makes a virtue of his low budget by transforming financial restraint into an aesthetic choice and this assured debut feature reveals that he is a talent to watch.

This year’s programme was dominated by realism, psychology and low-budget intelligence, which was particularly noticeable in the selection of British films. However, the excitement about new British cinema was dampened down by the bleakness and austerity that characterised most of the films. Duane Hopkins’s eagerly awaited debut feature Better Things was a lyrical yet painfully grim tale of drug abuse, sexual confusion and the cruel realities of growing up in the Cotswolds. Other critics were seduced by Helen, Christine Molloy’s slow-burning drama in which a missing girl’s persona starts to influence the girl who agrees to take part in a police investigation to help find her. Despite an astonishing performance by young Annie Townsend in the lead, the film is maybe too deliberately cryptic for its own good and not quite the revelation so many were hoping for. After all this misery, Shane Meadows’s Somers Town proved to be the most enjoyable and compelling British feature, managing to be gently melancholic, toughly funny and irresistibly charming in equal parts.

In terms of quality and innovation, the foreign-language films clearly dominated the programme and The Wave proved that German cinema is still going strong. Dennis Gansel’s smart, slick and powerful film is an adaptation of the real-life teaching experiment that originally took place in a Californian High School in 1967. What begins as a clever educational game that aims at probing the social order and reveal the roots of fascism escalates into tragedy, culminating in painful disillusionment and frightening violence in the grim last act.

The festival proved most convincing in its section of distinctive and often small-scale documentaries, the more personal films often proving to be the most accomplished and satisfying ones. The best British documentary, though not officially included in the section, was James Marsh’s Man on Wire, which recounts Philippe Petit’s staggering attempt to walk a tightrope between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. There were also fascinating portraits of unique, eccentric men, such as Matt Wolf’s affectionate tribute Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, and Erik Nelson’s Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which offers a glimpse into the incredible mind of American cult writer Harlan Ellison. Other treasures to be found in this section included Jesus Christ Saviour, which already stood out at this year’s Berlinale in February.

Significantly, it was the excellent Shirley Clarke retrospective that ensured there was always something worth seeing. It provided the rare opportunity to watch Clarke’s magnificently stark The Cool World on a cinema screen, while also presenting the memorable and rarely-screened documentary Rome Burns (Rome Brûle – Portrait de Shirley Clarke), a collection of delightfully unpretentious interviews with Clarke shot in January 1968. Seeing the fascinating filmmaker nonchalantly talking about her work to date while Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono hang out on a futon in the corner might have been the closest Edinburgh came to an event.

Pamela Jahn

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: See also EIFF 08: Under the Radar, Interview with Olly Blackburn, Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter (Donkey Punch) and Standard Operating Procedure.

Fashion in Film Festival

10 – 31 May 2008

Fashion in Film Website

Alone at last, Bette Davis reaches out for the object of her desire: a deliciously alluring mink coat. Caressing the fur, Davis envelops herself in its sensual embrace, looks longingly at her own reflection and twirls around the pokey living room. The screen suddenly blackens… Davis reappears exhausted, lying on the sofa, puffing on a cigarette. This absurd tryst (the cause of much laughter amongst the assembled audience), with its glamour, elegance and sense of fun, provided a fitting entrée into this year’s Fashion in Film Festival.

With a special focus on the links between fashion, crime and violence, the festival’s carefully selected programme provided a host of thieves, petty criminals and femme fatales fixated on acquiring the latest ‘it’ accessory. Forget feeble lusting over Manolo Blahniks, these formidable heroines took lusting over clothing to a dangerous and criminal extreme. In fact, watching the beautiful array of costumes, it was hard not to sympathise… just a little!

In Asphalt (1929) – a striking example of German Expressionist film – the beautiful actress Betty Amman played a glamorous kleptomaniac with an impossibly chic closet of stolen jewels and furs. Dressed in an array of stunning silk, lace and fur outfits designed by René Hubert (who worked for Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo), Amman used her sexual magnetism to distract the hapless owner of a jewellery store and a morally upstanding police officer. Shots of Amman’s stocking-clad legs provided a link between sex and crime, perfectly mirrored in other works showing in the Criminal Desire strand of the festival.

In The Pearl (1929), another seductive temptress used her charms to steal a piece of jewellery, in this case, a pearl necklace, from a young man hoping to impress his doting, innocent girlfriend. A game of chase ensues between the young man and the female jewellery thief, and he quickly becomes smitten with this conniving criminal. Screening alongside a number of silent shorts, this Belgian surrealist work, with its army of female robbers dressed in figure-hugging body suits, was a real visual treat. In The Kidnapping of Fux the Banker (1923), an early Czech crime parody that enjoyed its UK premiere at the festival, yet again, the male of the species is taken for a ride. Having already financially ruined one suitor with her clothing habit, the greedy flapper Maud hatches an elaborate plan to find a substitute, bringing about a farcical plotline with a cast of cartoon-like characters including the hopeless detective ‘Sherlock Holmes II’.

As well as giving audiences the chance to see these rare early films, the festival offered an array of talks and introductions. Those attending the special symposium ‘Taking Stock’ at the ICA soon learnt that Bette Davis wasn’t the only leading lady with a passion for mink. In a fascinating lecture, film noir expert Petra Dominkova revealed the mink coat to be a status symbol with much deeper cultural and social significance than a mere frivolous piece of fashion. Indeed, this was the beauty of the festival: it looked beyond the groomed surface and used clothes to discuss questions of power, status, sex and greed. With such intelligent curating and rich themes, we eagerly await the next instalment of the Fashion in Film Festival.

Eleanor McKeown

Still from Memories of Matsuko

Tiger Festival

May 29-June 8
London, ICA

June 11-June 24
Brighton, Duke of York’s Picturehouse

Festival programme

Watch the trailer

SPECIAL EVENTS:

Meet Korean director Im Sang-soo: Drinks and signing session at the Korean Cultural Centre, London, Friday 30 May, 6:30-9pm, and Saturday 31 May, 6:30pm, before the screening of The President’s Last Bang at the ICA.

‘Meet the distributors’ seminar, Friday 31 May, 3:30-4:30, Sofitel St James, London: A chance to watch trailers of forthcoming releases and speak to UK distributors of Asian cinema.

Following the Beijing 2008 torch relay fiasco and the opening of the largest ever Chinese cultural festival in London (China Now), the time is ripe for a festival of Far East films to grace our screens.

Returning for a bigger, brighter, louder second year, the Tiger Festival will screen thirteen features from the Far East in London and Brighton from May 29 to June 24. The independent festival is also running a short film competition with a Far Eastern theme in conjunction with nonmultiplexcinema.com as well as playing host to several side events and parties, including the official Tiger Festival Party at the ICA.

When was the last time you went to the cinema to see a purely Asian film – an Asian film without the cinematography of Chris Doyle, or the 3D wizardry of Animal Logic, or a storyline involving an American war hero? The Tiger Festival will give you a chance to do so, presenting innovative, bold cinema that offers perspectives on the world that are as varied as the region itself. So unique are the films that the festival’s organisers have had to come up with their own sub-genres to give us some sense of what’s in store: ‘Macabre Musical’, ‘Multiple Personality Thriller’, ‘Monster Fantasy Action’… This is a festival that will erase any pre-conceived notions you may have on Far Eastern cinema.

The opening night film, Memories of Matsuko (Japan, 2006, UK Premiere), is a bold choice. Part tragedy, part musical, part videogame-on-acid extravaganza, the film is largely seen through the Technicolor eyes of lost soul Shou. Asked by his estranged father to clean the apartment of a long-lost aunt who has just been found murdered, he is led to uncover her rich life, and this brings new meaning to his own. The film is certainly an acquired taste, but its bizarre mix of saccharine music video interludes and gritty dramatic bitterness makes it well worth the effort.

The festival will also screen the political satire The President’s Last Bang (Korea, 2005), giving UK audiences a rare insight into South Korea’s political climate in the late 70s. It depicts governmental corruption before focusing on the assassination of President Park Chung-hee. Director Im Sang-soo will be present for a Q&A session after the screening.

One standout from the programme is Fox Family (2006), also from Korea. With an opening line as odd as ‘Where can we find a lot of humans?’ you know you’re on to a good thing. Its initial atmosphere is very Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, before quickly veering wildly off course to completely unexplored cinematic territory. Sex and death and their various interactions dominate the film, with a few Mighty Boosh-esque dance numbers thrown in for good measure. This is fresh filmmaking meat at its rawest.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Read our comic strip review of Johnnie To’s Mad Detective, also showing at Tiger Festival, in our June print issue. For more details on where to buy the magazine, or if you wish to subscribe, email amanda@wallflowerpress.co.uk. For more information on the contents of the June issue go to our magazine page.

Photo: Pang Ho Cheung and Peter Kam at Udine 10 (photo by Joey Leung)

Udine Far East Film Festival 10

18-26 April 2008

Festival website

Where can you get sixty Far East Films in a thousand-seat auditorium, fifty leading Asian directors and producers, a dozen three-meter wide red balloons, and welcoming restaurants serving pizza and red wine at 4am?

The answer is Udine, the north-eastern Italian town that has become the unlikely European Mecca for Far Eastern Films. Though in its tenth year, this April festival is a well-kept secret for those of us in the UK, now more accessible thanks to low-cost flights to nearby Trieste and Venice.

The charm and appeal of this festival lies in its intimate setting, where, after a day’s work watching movies, you are likely to be eating in the same restaurants and drinking in the same bars as the ultra-relaxed and approachable legends Hideo Nakata and Johnnie To.

It is both astonishing and encouraging to see that every event and screening were attended predominantly by the local Italian population who have an insatiable appetite for movies ranging from the bizarre and blackly comic films of Miki Satoshi (sadly, little known or distributed here), to the serious (Mr Cinema, starring Anthony Wong) and the headline-grabbing blockbusters (Assembly, Death Note); every screening from 9am to 1am was close to packed.

The locals’ enthusiasm could be seen even in the foyer of the venue, where the audiences flocked around festival merchandise: mugs, sweatshirts, caps, DVDs of previous festival films and authoritative books in all languages on topics from Wong Kar-wai to the Shaw Brothers, from kick-ass flicks to Akira Kurosawa.

The pick of the crop for this year was Zombi kampung pisang (Zombies in Banana Village), a quirky, low-budget Malay zom-com which someone somewhere will undoubtedly label as Malaysia’s Shaun of the Dead. This is no break-out blockbuster hit, nor an instant cult classic, just a surprisingly entertaining and silly film, a hidden gem amongst an already fantastic line-up.

Another standout was Going by the Book (Bareuge salja), which stars Jeong Jae-yeong (from the feel-good Welcome to Dongmakgol) as a policeman who plays the bank robber far too zealously during a role-play training exercise, outwitting his colleagues at every turn; comic set-ups involving the hostages were exploited to their full hilarious potential.

The tenth edition of this festival was celebrated with a unique trailer by Hong Kong indie favourite, Pang Ho Cheung (Isabella, AV, Beyond our Ken), who was on hand to introduce his collection of short stories Trivial Matters (Por see yee), based on a book he wrote when he was twenty-one. Topics in these stories will be familiar to Pang Ho Cheung fans: sex (opening story is of a married couple’s visit to a shrink, recounting their dissatisfaction in bed, with their dialogue cleverly paced to a… er… climax), the male vs the female (Eason Chan convincing his live-in girlfriend to give him oral sex, since she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage – but who has the last laugh?) and friendship (Gillian Chung lying to her best friend at school, and the following guilt and long-term repercussion in her adult life).

Pang Ho Cheung is certainly a director and storyteller to watch (AV was picked up for remake by the Weinstein Company as Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and we had the pleasure of interviewing his producer Subi Liang to shine a light on his work (see below).

Sadly, the Horror Day yielded nothing fresh from the region; of course, it is hard to push the boundaries of imagination further than The Ring, Audition, and more recently, A Tale of Two Sisters. However, even the promisingly titled Sick Nurses from Thailand (with an equally promising opening) plundered the long-haired Asian ghost image to no end. This is one genre that is in need of revitalising.

Despite this, the festival is definitely a must for all international cinema lovers – flights aren’t too expensive from the UK, food is great, you’ll meet a range of fans and industry types, and some of the films will never make it to the Hollywood-dominated big screens in the UK, so catch them if you can! Don’t miss the eleventh edition next April.

A QUICK AND DIRTY WITH SUBI LIANG

Joey Leung: Describe your work as a producer.

Subi Liang: When I’m working on a project, budgeting is the most important area, to deliver a film on budget. I also like to keep things on schedule. We will be involved throughout the whole life of the film, from concept right through to after we deliver the film to distributors (to the point where they think I’m interfering sometimes!). I’m also the general fixer behind the scenes, any stuff that needs sorting out, resolving arguments, anything.

JL: A lot of films of yours have universally comic situations. Why limit yourselves to working solely in Hong Kong?

SL: Much of this depends on financing and opportunities. We have been approached by overseas companies with other projects in the past and it’s definitely something we are open to for the future. Pang Ho Cheung also likes to keep creative control to keep his own style.

JL: He looks like a fun guy to work with.

SL: He’s a workaholic! He works both the crew and the production team quite hard as he has high expectations in his mind of what the outcome should be like. He’s a Virgo!

[and on cue, Pang Ho Cheung appears playfully behind us with a prosciutto slice wrapped round a bread stick and smoking it like a Marx Brothers cigar!]

JL: Hong Kong can be quite traditional and conservative in its attitudes towards sexual topics. Has the type of comedies you’ve made (with their comical sexual situations) been accepted in Hong Kong?

SL: In general, yes, they have been well received.

JL: Do you ever get bored doing interviews?

SL: Well I’ve not done many! I usually prefer being behind the scenes. Actually, I’m quite nervous right now!

Joey Leung

Photo: John Woo at Cannes Film Festival 2008 (photo by Joey Leung)

Cannes Film Festival

14-25 May 2008

Festival website

Cannes. THE festival of all film festivals. Memories of Truffaut, Bardot, Godard from a bygone era, and more recently the Hollywood glitz of The Da Vinci Code, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a chance to rub shoulders with jury members Sean Penn and Natalie Portman.

But not for this intrepid reporter.

Shunning glamour for realistic, gritty, true cinema, and working too hard to party with the stars, we bring you coverage of the REAL Cannes, the Cannes behind the scenes where deals are made, new films discovered, and new directors uncovered – the working-class heroes’ Cannes (in truth, a Cannes where virtually no party invites came our way so we went to watch some films instead…).

Here’s what happens in all the different facets that make up the Cannes Film Festival; here’s…The Electric Sheep Guide to Cannes.

THE MARKET SCREENING

(Distributors register for the Cannes Market, which runs alongside the Cannes Film Festival, giving them access to watch films and decide whether or not to buy the rights to distribute the film in their territory. You can register for the market if you pay and have some sort of link to the industry to get your accreditation.)

What a better place to start than with the… double impact of Jean-Claude Van Damme, (or JCVD as he is now known), starring in a film about Jean-Claude Van Damme about the life of… er… Jean-Claude Van Damme. JCVD starts with an implausibly long take with our universal soldier taking on an endless string of baddies in military uniforms with knives, guns, flame-throwers, more guns, and some with just good old hand-to-hand combat. Finally, when he breaks through the last door, we realise that he is on a film set; he rushes straight to the director and complains about not having a stunt double during the middle part of that lengthy sequence, uttering the immortal words, ‘I can’t do this shit anymore… I’m fucking forty-seven years old…’

Something a little different from the run-of-the-mill kick-ass Van Damme films, it was actually a clever non-linear, multi-point of view story that was just plain good fun (in fact you could probably say it was no… knock off of his usual films! OK OK, enough of the Van Damme jokes). Revolver have picked up the rights for UK so expect this to hit our cinemas towards the end of this year.

Van Damme himself was at this screening and he mingled with the audience a little afterwards, asking them if they cried during this film; there is a sensitive sequence during JCVD where he seemingly breaks off from the shoot and turns to the camera in a spontaneous monologue, talking about the falseness and superficiality of Hollywood and the struggles he has had – tears streaming down his face (this actually did move a number of the audience members).

We wonder if John Woo would have cried? Which brings us seamlessly to another feature of Cannes…

THE PRESS CONFERENCE

(Much like any other press conference, new films are announced and footage shown. Wow factor comes from directors and stars in attendance. Usually takes place in the large hotels where the real power play happens.)

Electric Sheep were invited along to John Woo’s press conference on his latest movie, a Chinese language historical battle epic called Red Cliff (Chi Bi). Those of you who follow Asian cinema news may already know of this title, and if you do, you will probably have read about the production difficulties plaguing this project, with Chow Yun Fat walking off the set a few days into the shoot, prompting cast changes and a lot of shuffling around (like a ten-man team whose striker has been sent off).

The cast obviously rallied around this project – most of the leading actors attended the press conference to show their support for the return of John Woo (the man who will forever be associated with the ‘gun ballet’ genre) back to Asia: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Lust, Caution) and Zhao Wei (Shaolin Soccer) will be the big names know to Western audiences. There was also a host of well-known Asian actors who have an enigmatic presence both on and off the screen (Chang Chen, Zhang Fengyi, Lin Chiling and Hu Jun).

Despite the setbacks, the production ploughed on and the results are worth the wait. There have been a host of historical big battle epics recently (Warlords by Peter Chan and Wai Man Yip and Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon by Daniel Lee). This, however, is a bigger beast with a bigger budget and astounding results – the sweeping aerial shots of the legions of soldiers on the battlefield are not the usual cut-and-paste CGI square blocks of groups of battalions, but each battalion is done separately with their own battle formation.

Action sequences are well directed as you expect from this director,and colours are not as gritty and grey as in the aforementioned Warlords and Three Kingdoms (in fact, Red Cliff focuses on one of the battles in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a Chinese historical novel that is read by all school children in China and Hong Kong and on which Daniel Lee’s film is based). When asked by a member of the press what he had learnt and brought back from Hollywood, John Woo talked about bringing new techniques for the younger members of the crew to learn… and after a slight pause, said jokingly, ‘.. but I still have my own style, you’ll see lots of doves flying around…’

With the strong presence of a beautiful female cast, there is inevitably going to be some love interest element to the film. We must await the final cut to see the actual weighted balance between action and romance before we can pass a final verdict on this film. With some final scenes to shoot and some post-production to finish off, this title should be out in the next three months in Asia. EIV, the people who released The Departed, will be bringing this to the UK shortly after.

THE PARTY

(Essential for any Cannes visit, if you don’t have an invite, you might as well try to blag your way into Fort Knox. Usually happens on marquees next to the beach, or if you are Hollywood ‘A’ List, in a villa on the hills.)

KOFIC, the Korean Film Council, hosted a lavish party filled with all the food and drink you could take, right on the Cannes beach. Producers, sales agents, distributors, actors, directors, journalists, film festival organisers – all the elements of Cannes were there, spirits high despite a slight drizzle.

Electric Sheep mingled briefly with new director Na Hong-jin whose tense debut, The Chaser (see below), was in the Official Selection Midnight Screenings at Cannes. We chatted and joked also with actor Kim Yun-seok (The Chaser, Tazza: The High Rollers). Some chat with sales agents from Korea and the rest of Asia revealed that this had been quite a slow and flat Cannes. There are less completed blockbusters featuring big stars than in previous years.

After 2am, the house music was suddenly turned up many notches with the bass beating so hard you could physically feel it on your chest, and no one could hear each other – many took this as a cue (or a very subtle hint) to leave and drift off into the night. The highly enjoyable KOFIC party was a great note to end Electric Sheep‘s short foray into Cannes 2008.

ELECTRIC SHEEP’S TOP TIP FOR THE FILM TO WATCH OUT FOR:

The Chaser (Chugyeogja), South Korea
Official Selection, Special Screenings, Cannes 2008

From first-time director Na Hong-jin comes a film that is part Seven, part 24.

Joong-ho (Kim Yun-seok) is an ex-cop turned pimp whose call-girls have recently gone missing. He assumes they ran away from the night business until he tracks their bookings back to one client in particular; the audience are then introduced to a psychopathic serial killer who keeps the girls in the basement of his house, torturing them calmly till they die – during one gruesome scene, in an intense close-up shot, he takes a hammer and chisel to the head of his latest victim, Mi-jin (Seo Yeong-hie, Shadows in the Palace) wriggling in distress whilst the hammer blows come down.

Suspense builds after Joong-ho catches the killer, takes him to the police station, only for himself to be accused of assault and impersonation of a police officer and the killer being freed – not only is the chase on again, but Mi-jin is still slowly bleeding to death in the basement, preying on Joong-ho’s conscience. By the time the police realise that they let the real killer go, Joong-ho is already in the field, a few steps ahead of them, working alone, Jack Bauer-style.

Kim Yun-seok gives an excellent performance as the tough pimp who softens up and genuinely takes responsibility, feeling he has a duty of care for his charges. Filmed mostly at night and with many hand-held sequences, The Chaser is a highly polished and accomplished first film.

Expect this film to hit our screens twice – Metrodome (the people who brought us Donnie Darko and Assembly) will be releasing this title in the UK and Warner Bros have bought the remake rights.

Joey Leung

Still from P2, screening at Cine-Excess on May 1

Cine Excess Cinema

1-3 May 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Programme

P2 is released nationwide on May 2

Distributor: Tartan Films

Director: Frank Khalfoun

Writers: Frank Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur

Cast: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Philip Akin

USA 2007

98 mins

Launched last year as part of Sci-Fi London, the Cine-Excess festival was so successful that it returns this year as an independent festival hosted by the ICA (London) from May 1-3. Over three days, this cult extravaganza offers academic papers alongside film screenings and talks by leading genre filmmakers and critics. The guest of honour this year is Roger Corman, who will be presented with a lifetime achievement award. We talked to Xavier Mendik, director of the Cult Film Archive at Brunel University, author of a number of books on cult cinema and organiser of Cine-Excess.

Virginie Sélavy: You aim to bring together the academic world with the world of cult film fandom. How does that work?

Xavier Mendik: It might surprise you to know that academics have been really interested in cult movies for quite a while now. There’s been a lot of activity for the last ten years around genre filmmaking, around cult auteurs and particularly cult fans. So really what we’ve done is harness the interest that’s been there for ten years within a film festival format.

VS: What are the advantages of having a mixed festival?

XM: All the directors I’ve interviewed have been really interested in academic interpretations of their work. Someone like David Cronenberg, who I interviewed a few years back, really gave me a run for my money by saying things like, ‘well, actually, your interpretation of Freud is rather narrow there’, and I thought, wow, these people really do know the other side of the coin. In a way, all we’re doing is bringing to life those connections that remain hidden and we’ve found that people want to make those connections.

VS: Can you give us an idea of the kind of topics that will be discussed in the conference part of the festival?

XM: We’ve got 15 parallel strands that deal with everything from famous cult auteurs to Italian trash cinema, to global cult film traditions, particularly Third World traditions, to debates on the role of the cult performer and a panel session on cult soundtrack. We’ve also got a number of panel sessions around dangerous cult genres, one looking at the erotic image, one looking at grindhouse traditions, and later Stateside cult phenomena. What we’re doing is to indicate that cult these days is global, and we’re trying to capture the very best of the global market and hopefully bring it to an interested audience.

VS: Are the conferences open to all or are they only for the academic participants?

XM: It’s all about breaking down boundaries, so what I see is that ordinary cinema-goers will be as interested in the debates as they are in the UK premieres.

VS: You’ve also got a special panel discussion on Brit horror, chaired by Kim Newman. Is this part of an effort to focus on home-grown cult cinema?

XM: One of the things that we’re often guilty of is looking too far overseas when in fact there’s a wealth of talent outside the mainstream here in the UK. My background is in Italian horror, I did all my research on Dario Argento years ago, and that was probably more dangerous than doing Cine-Excess because in those days it was seen as really going out on a limb to be talking about continental cult cinema. In the last two-three years we’ve seen a mini-explosion in Brit cinema and Brit horror in particular, and we’re really interested in that.

VS: What do you think of the state of British horror at the moment?

XM: I think it’s really interesting right now. Cult never occurs in a vacuum, it’s always a social barometer of things that are happening in wider society. That’s why American cult cinema is so interesting, it always reflects tensions and fears. From Shaun of the Dead onwards, I think it’s a reaction to the fact that there’s something quite stale and moribund and not very exciting in wider British society right now. And I think the cult film generation, the new Brit horror directors that are coming through, are really shaking that up in interesting ways.

VS: To go back to something you said earlier, it’s interesting that you think that things have changed in the academic world since you did your research on Dario Argento. When did things start to change and why?

XM: What’s happened is a growing critical acceptance that creativity does in fact lie beyond the mainstream, that so-called underground or cult areas of activities are populated by fascinating, possibly off the wall, but very creative individuals. And because they’re not constrained by the mainstream, their productions can be far more creative and challenging and often far more political. I think the way to think about cult movies is the pulp as political, that’s what we often say and that’s still the case.

I think in the case of Dario Argento, his growth as a cult figure coincided with the very notorious period of the video nasties in the early 80s, which meant that you had to trawl halfway around the country and see some kind of dodgy market dealer called Brian to get hold of these movies on third-generation copies. And what you found when you watched them is that despite their so-called horrific labels, they’re actually quite artistic. Argento is interesting for a number of reasons, because he breaks down the barriers between commercial film production and avant-garde. You’re never quite sure if these are art-house movies or straight-to-video horror films. But they’re also interesting in terms of gender representation. We’re still very much used to the whole idea of woman as victim within cult horror and what you find is that Argento’s films are populated by monstrously aggressive women. I have to say, he’s lost a bit of ground in recent years so the attention has moved elsewhere, but I’m still proud to say that I did the first MA research on Dario Argento.

VS: What films will you be showing this year?

XM:We have the new cat-and-mouse thriller P2, which is made by the creative team that brought us Switchblade Romance and The Hills Have Eyes. Alexandre Aja, the director of those movies, is the producer here, and Frank Khalfoun, who was the actor in Switchblade Romance, is directing for the first time. It’s a really fascinating movie about a female yuppie trapped in a high-rise building block on Christmas Eve by a deranged mechanic. After so many years watching cult movies, commissioning them for festivals, it’s very rare for a movie to make me jump out of my seat and this one did, so I had to have it. What I find fascinating these days about those kinds of movie-makers is the fact that you’re finding them so readily imported into Hollywood, so there’s an awareness that this European filmmaking talent is really reviving the American film industry.

VS: But they’re influenced by American filmmaking themselves; Alexandre Aja is very much influenced by Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven and 70s and 80s American horror.

XM: Absolutely. Robin Wood wrote a fascinating book many years ago; academic texts tend to date very quickly but this book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan is as current now as it was in the early 80s. It’s about the fact that horror films in particular always reflect wider social crises and tensions, particularly in America. So in the 70s, in the years of Vietnam, the Watergate, race riots and political corruption, we had a whole slew of very pessimistic and nihilistic horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead. And lo and behold, in the years of 9/11 those are exactly the films that are being remade by a new generation of filmmakers like Alexandre Aja.

VS: It’s interesting also that Aja is a French director because there’s no real horror tradition, at least not that type of horror, in France.

XM: It’s interesting because in France there was always an exploitation tradition. France had the kind of cachet to be able to market exploitation as art-house, particularly in the 60s and 70s where in other regions nudity was taboo. So it’s always smuggled cult under the wire and I think Alexandre is just making that explicit. It’s rare to say that a remake is better but much as I like Wes Craven I have to say that the remake of The Hills Have Eyes is absolutely top. So we’re delighted to have P2. What we’re trying to do with Cine-Excess is to always try and be on the tip of current trends so alongside P2 we’ve got a new American backwoods splatter movie called Timber Falls, by Tony Giglio. That comes out nationwide on May 23. What I liked about that movie is that it’s doing interesting things with the American survivalist genre and highlighting the craze around religious fundamentalism. There’s a lot of swipes at the American right in the movie and the whole politics-into-religion vibe that’s so current with the Bush administration. I am also proud to promote Brit horror and we have two exclusive Brit screenings. We’ve got the new sex and horror thriller Mind Flesh by Robert Pratten, his second movie. His first movie London Voodoo got rave reviews. I remember him saying to me last year he didn’t think the Cine-Excess audience would like London Voodoo because it’s more of a mood piece; what I would say is that they will love Mind Flesh, because it’s extremely gory, extremely explicit, but as with Robert Pratten’s other work, it’s extremely intelligent. It’s almost like a Freudian gore movie. We’re also delighted to have a movie by Julian Richards, who’s another intelligent Brit horror director. This is his new movie, Summer Scars, which is apparently based on an incident in Julian’s teenage past about a scary guy who wanders into a teenage group’s daily life and disrupts it with fairly traumatic consequences. We’ve also tied in to the Curzon Soho to bring cinema-goers an evening of Roger Corman movies – we’ll be screening The Intruder and Masque of the Red Death.

VS:How do you select the films? You’ve just mentioned gore in relation to Mind Flesh, any other criteria?

XM:I would say gore isn’t a key thing here, I think these movies have to be unnerving and I’m always particularly interested in the fact that cult movies tend to be political movies. I think cult wouldn’t work in a period of social stability. 80s horror is nowhere near as good as 70s horror, because what tends to happen is when society feels stable and comfortable the horror tends to be very joky and unthreatening, which is why Freddy part 8 is nowhere near the movies Alexandre Aja was influenced by. Right now we’re in such a profound period of instability both in the UK and the US, it’s producing great movies. So gore is not a key criterion, the ability to be shocking and socially critiquing is more of interest to me than the actual splatter quota.

VS: I thought it was interesting that you described the films on the programme as ‘new cult movies’. Can you really have a ‘new cult movie’? Isn’t a ‘cult movie’ a phenomenon that happens with time, something that grows organically from the spontaneous response of the audience?

XM: Very good point. There’s lots of different ways of defining ‘cult’. There are movies that are ‘cult’ by virtue of the genre, and content that they deal with, and by that virtue I think those are cult movies – and also because I feel you’ve put me on the spot so I’ve got to wriggle like an eel out of that difficult position now (laughs). I do agree with what you say, many cult movies are cult by evolution and what’s very interesting is how cult audiences make them cult movies. To give you one example, Paul Verhoeven’s lap-dancing spectacular Showgirls was roundly condemned when it was released a couple of years ago, but the movie was picked up by gay audiences on the Midnight Movies circuit who read it as a critique of male sexuality and then it got its cult status. So it’s part genre and part content, but there is an evolutionary aspect. Maybe what will happen is that these movies will start out as cult movies but after Cine-Excess they’ll go mainstream.

VS: This year you have Roger Corman as your guest of honour.

XM: Yeah, we’ve invited him to receive a lifetime Cine-Excess achievement award in recognition of the fact that this is one of the true creators of American cinema. He directed some of the most memorable cult movies of post-war America, from The Intruder, a cutting-edge race drama with a pre-Star Trek William Shatner to all those great Gothic horror movies with Vincent Price like Masque of the Red Death, to ground-breaking biker movies like Wild Angels. He’s really been a profoundly innovative film director. But that’s only half the story; he’s also the man who in many respects made the new Hollywood, he broke new talent like Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, as well as directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. So we’re really celebrating a man of many unique talents and we’re delighted that he’s coming over to accept his award on Friday 2 May and giving an onstage interview on Saturday 3.

Fashion in Film Festival

10 – 31 May 2008

Programme

While the BFI’s Pop Goes the Revolution season was a slightly fluffy affair offering little insight into French cinema and May 68, this month sees the Southbank cinema host part of the Fashion in Film Festival, which conversely offers an impressively rich and well thought out programme. Funnily enough, Pop Goes the Revolution included a screening of Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, an absurdist, op-art inspired satire of the fashion world that would have been more at home at FFF – and was indeed screened at its first edition in May 2006. For this second outing, the festival explores the relationship between cinema, fashion, crime and violence through an imaginative selection that spans over ten countries, nine decades and a variety of genres from film noir to horror. In addition, seriously knowledgeable speakers will be discussing topics ranging from ‘the semiotics of stained clothing’ to the significance of the femme fatale‘s mink coat in 1940s cinema.

The festival includes a number of silent gems, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927); seen by Hitchcock as his first proper film, it is a murder thriller inspired by Jack the Ripper, starring Ivor Novello in the role of a sinister stranger attracted to a blonde fashion model. Also of note is The Rat (1925), another British silent featuring Ivor Novello; when his cocky Parisian bad boy meets Isabel Jeans’s glamorous Zelie de Chaumet, sparks fly and the stage is set for a roaring melodrama.

Elsewhere, the programme draws from the bountiful supply of macabre stylishness provided by giallo cinema, including Mario Bava’s 1964 Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino), a gorgeously photographed baroque shocker set in a fashion house, and Dario Argento’s 1970 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo), an Ennio Morricone-scored thriller about a serial killer clad in black PVC. Also from Italy is the rarely screened The Tenth Victim (La decima vittima, 1965), a futuristic, pop-art extravaganza starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress as the contestants in a deadly game, which somehow manages to fit in a fashion display of modernist geometric outfits.

Other films of interest include Follow Me Quietly (1949), an intriguing Richard Fleischer noir in which a detective uses a faceless dummy to reconstruct the crimes of an elusive serial killer. Vicente Aranda’s Fata Morgana (1965) is a formally daring thriller about yet another endangered model set in a dystopian future. Among the more recent films, Cindy Sherman’s first feature, Office Killer (1997), is a caricature of the psycho-killer genre, with a meek office worker transformed into a homicidal vamp. In The Red Shoes, Korean director Kim Youn-gyun delivers a gory update of the Andersen fairy tale that inspired the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic. Among the documentaries, Zoot Suit Riots (2001) stands out, exploring the demonisation of the Mexican baggy-clothed youth in 1940s America.

In addition to the extensive film schedule, the BFI Southbank will play host to a weekend of 20s-style decadence and frivolity around the theme ‘Dressed to Kill’, including a jazz brunch, workshops, a Radio Days vintage stall, absinthe cocktails and a flapper evening entitled ‘The White Coffin Club’ (after the club featured in The Rat) hosted by Johnny Vercoutre (Time for Tea / Modern Times) and David Piper (Rakehalls).

Virginie Sélavy

SCI-FI LONDON

30 April – 4 May 2008

Venue: Apollo Cinema

Festival website

A couple of years ago I took a friend to see a film at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival and on the way out he casually said to one of the organisers that he was enjoying the convention… This brought the swift rebuke, ‘this is not a convention, it’s a festival!’ I can understand the confusion. In many respects it’s never been easier to be a sci-fi fan in this country. Doctor Who is the second most popular show on British television and in America, Battlestar Galactica gets plaudits from highbrow magazines and newspapers alike. Before either of these shows were revived, it was considered embarrassing to admit you were a fan of the old versions (except as some kind of ironic appreciation of retro TV) and it would have been immediately assumed that you were a 30-something, anorak-wearing social misfit who still lived with their parents. If you were a fan – and I use the word in italics to suggest that the word itself came with negative connotations and the baggage of stereotype – then to find out more about your niche interest, you might go to conventions to meet other fans. There, you could exchange over-priced merchandise, buy fanzines and audio tapes based on your favourite shows and pay £15 for the signature of a D-list actor who once played a Klingon 20 years ago.

Nowadays, these kinds of conventions still exist and yes, you may find stereotypical fans at Sci-Fi London but since science fiction has become more socially acceptable, the festival also attracts casual consumers of sci-fi who want to see something more underground or ‘art-house’ than what TV and big-budget cinema have to offer. Now in its 7th year, SFL has been held in the centre of the city since its conception – and not in some warehouse in Outer London, as might be expected. Like the bigger, more generalist London Film Festival, SFL brings us films that may never get released in regular cinemas or even on DVD in this country. At the last few festivals, I’ve seen some of the best genre films of recent years – Subject Two, 1 point 0, Robot Stories, The Great Yokai War – some of the worst – The Fall of the Louse of Usher (sic) and Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth – and some of the most overrated – Primer – but this is the way with all specialist film festivals, be it the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the German Film Festival, etc. While it would be great if (art-house) cinemas had weekly slots for unseen sci-fi, gay or German films on a regular basis so you wouldn’t have to cram a year’s worth of a certain genre into a long weekend, this is the current state of affairs, so we should celebrate what we have.

This year’s Sci-Fi London has already announced two premieres that justify the existence of the festival alone. First there’s Dante 01 by Marc Caro, co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. When Jean Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro went their separate ways after The City, Jeunet continued to make successful films on his own such as Amelie, while Caro became an art director on the likes of Vidoc, a genre classic that deserved more attention than it got on its release seven years ago. Not much information has been released on Dante 01 yet, but since Vidoc’s ‘steam-punk’ look, which made nineteenth-century Paris look like a living oil painting through the use of evocative CGI, I’ve been looking forward to Caro’s follow-up. What’s more, Dante 01 mixes the prison genre with sci-fi and fantasy elements, so I hope that it will continue the tradition of such great films as Cube, Prison, Fortress and Maléfique.

The other exciting premiere this year is La Antena, an intriguing, silent, monochrome Argentine movie that occupies the middle ground between the films of Guy Maddin and Guillermo Del Toro. Plot-wise, it reworks Orwellian themes of cultural domination, brain-washing by TV and state symbols of oppression into an expressionistic fairy tale. La Antena was the first film to be shown as both the opening and closing film of the Rotterdam Film Festival this year and comes with a raft of awards. Following the success of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage, this will hopefully continue the Latin American fantasy renaissance that flowered in literature half a century ago and now seems to have come to fruition in cinema as well.

Like its horror counterpart Frightfest, SFL also does all-night screenings (something that the BFI IMAX has started to copy over the last year), and these have previously included animé and black and white British sci-fi films. This year as ever, there’s a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 all-night screening, which combines improv comedy with screenings of ‘turkeys’ from the last fifty years. It’s events like these and the ‘talkeoke’ sessions in previous years that have kept a bit of the convention flavour going in the festival, even if the organisers are at pains to suggest otherwise.

There are still many old-school fans in attendance but SFL also attracts cooler fashionistas looking for alternative programming. By having a variety of events that range from highbrow to lowbrow – encompassing the Douglas Adams Memorial Debate, the Arthur C. Clarke Awards and a little bit of cosplay – the festival tries to be all things to all (sci-fi) men and it almost always succeeds. That said, I miss the days when some of the films were shown at Curzon Soho and some at the Other/Metro Cinema and worry that by being hosted at the Apollo West End it has gone for a venue that is slightly intimidating and overpriced for both sci-fi and art-house fans. But the friendly atmosphere, free gifts and celebrity guests (such as last year’s John Landis and Stuart Gordon) make up for this a great deal and I can’t think of a better way to spend the May bank holiday.

Alex Fitch

Berlinale

8-16 February 2008

This year, the true beauties of the Berlinale film festival remained on the margins: in the final days of the cine-marathon, a cinema far away from the buzzing festival centre presented a late-matinee screening of Wakamatsu Koji’s stunning exploitation classic Ecstasy of the Angels (Teshi no kokotsu), a visually stunning head-on collision of explicit violence, political revolt and soft-core porn. Part of a mini-tribute to Wakamatsu’s work – whose latest film United Red Army premiered this year in the International Forum section – this early feature tells the story of a left-wing terrorist faction planning an all-out attack on Tokyo. Despite all the kinky sex and ferocious brutality, Wakamatsu’s main concern is to explore the sacrifice and self-destruction that the revolutionary process requires from the young radicals, and to observe how they ultimately turn against each other instead of combining their forces to fight the odious system.

United Red Army, which I’d seen only a few days before, then almost felt like a remake of Ecstasy, which he made in 1972. In his new film, Wakamatsu sets out to reveal the full history of the militant student movement that rocked Japan during the 1960s in a challenging three-hour docu-fiction drama, staged as a chamber play in the group’s mountain hide-out. Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of both films is an oddly engaging energy and a genuinely disturbing quality, which was absent from most of the works presented in the three main festival sections. That said, leaving the blatantly commercial and rather underwhelming films in the Official Competition aside, there were some welcome surprises in the other two main sections – Forum and Panorama.

Only vaguely related to the festival overall music focus was the wonderfully refreshing Russian feature Mermaid (Rusalka) by Anna Melykian. A freely adapted, near-surreal version of Antonin Dvorák’s eponymous opera, the film follows the bizarre life of an idealistic girl from childhood to maturity. While the tone is at times perplexingly downbeat, the film radiates a wonderful, bitter-sweet and light-hearted spirit that opened this year’s Panorama with a ray of light. Two fairly impressive documentaries offered musical experiences of different sorts: Steven Sebring’s rewarding Patti Smith: Dream of Life and the way more off-centre Heavy Metal In Baghdad, a touching portrait of an Iraq heavy metal band after the fall of Saddam Hussein, whose members struggle with the impossibility of living peacefully as long-haired head-bangers in a war-torn country.

Moving into low-budget, queer territory, the weirdest and undoubtedly most indigestible film was Bruce LaBruce’s latest provocation Otto; or Up with Dead People, which follows a depressed gay zombie through the streets and dark rooms of Berlin. Screened in London as part of this year’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the film mixes horror, hard-core porn, silent film and documentary into a mercilessly sensationalist shocker. Queer activist Rosa von Praunheim’s new documentary Dead Gay Men and Living Lesbians (Tote Schwule – Lebende Lesben) was disappointingly dilute, and didn’t live up to its promising title. Quite different from Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s debut The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, which sounded like a semi-improvised fairy tale about a Filipino ‘lady boy’ who meets her sleazy porn chatroom boss for a hanky-panky weekend in Paris, but turned out to be a charming first feature, once the faux documentary style had established a vivid, convincing world.

Although there was no readily identifiable new trend at this year’s festival, a loose group of films by Asian women directors all refreshingly focused on quotidian inconsequence. Kumazaka Izuru’s wonderful life-affirming feature Asyl (Asyl – Park and Love Hotel) – which deservedly won the Best First Feature Award – centres on the bizarre life of a middle-aged woman who runs an unusual love hotel in Tokyo, with a beautiful little park on its rooftop which is open to the public. Deliberately sullen and rather dark in tone, the film paints a complex portrait of the landlady and of three other women who rent rooms at the hotel, carefully revealing how their defiant spirit collides with false pretences and loneliness.

Equally remarkable for its acute attention to detail, Naoko Ogigami’s Glasses (Megane) was primarily a wonderfully detoxifying treat. Set on a nearly untouched island, the film takes time to explore the almost excessively relaxed insular mentality, and Ogigami skilfully handles the slow pace by filling her script with just the right amount of deadpan humour and ineffable sensuous delight. Both films share a heartfelt desire to step back from big themes and melodrama to look for new ways to uncover meaning in the transitional ebb and flow of everyday lives. Likewise, two multi-character features from Taiwan, Zero Chou’s Drifting Flowers (Piao Lang Qing Chun) and Singing Chen’s God Man Dog, presented elegant, episodical views of everyday life and love steeped in social realism and artistically shaped in a poetic narrative.

Among the vast quantity of new titles, these were the films that afforded the greatest pleasures. A few glorious works from the archives provided extra thrills: Peter Geyer’s Jesus Christ Savior (Jesus Christus Erlí¶ser) is the long-lost filmed record of an incredible theatrical monologue by Klaus Kinski, held in 1971, which turned into an aggressive altercation with the hostile audience. Elsewhere, Charles Burnett’s re-released 1983 My Brother’s Wedding authoritatively demonstrated what truly independent filmmaking really looks like. Cut down by Burnett himself to 81 impressively rich, deftly choreographed and toughly funny minutes, it was a wonderful, startling discovery that alone would have made the trip to Berlin worthwhile.

Pamela Jahn