Tag Archives: Guy Maddin

BFI London Film Festival 2015 Preview

LFF 2015

59th BFI London Film Festival

7 – 18 October 2015

London, UK

LFF website

Running from 7 to 18 October with screenings spread across central London and a number of participating local cinemas, the 2015 edition of the BFI London Film Festival opens with Sarah Gavron’s women’s rights drama Suffragette and closes with Danny Boyle’s biopic of Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender as the tech-wizard and former Apple CEO. In between, the line-up is packed with oddities, thrills and freaks, and some fine visceral horror.

Our top picks this year include festival hit The Forbidden Room, the latest offering from Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, who co-directed this busy, chaotic and occasionally perplexing nightmare in which plot, characters and locations constantly flow into one another enigmatically. We also highly recommend Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s impressive follow-up to Blue Ruin, the dazzling 140-minute one-take-wonder Victoria, directed by German director Sebastian Schipper, and Eva Husson’s striking first feature Bang Gang, which premiered in Toronto last month.

Other titles seen on the festival circuit include Robert Egger’s underwhelming The Witch, Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre first English-language film The Lobster, Alex van Warmerdam’s twisted contract killer comedy Schneider vs Bax and Takashi Miike’s new action fantasy Yakuza Apocalypse.

We look forward to Sion Sono’s spaced-out Love & Peace, along with Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise and Evolution, the long-awaited second feature by Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence). Also worth checking out are German body horror Der Nachtmahr, Spanish necrophilia drama The Corpse of Anna Fritz, horror Western Bone Tomahawk, Danish chiller What We Become, and The Invitation, a disturbing chamber piece from Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama. Plus, screening as part of ‘Sonic’ strand, we’ll be taking a look at Ruined Heart: Another Love Story between a Criminal and a Whore by punk filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz and John Pirozzi’s compelling documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock’n’Roll.

The archive screenings include Make More Noise, a selection representing women on film in the first decades of the 20th century, alongside a restoration of Edward Dmytryk’s stylish 1959 Western Warlock, Jean Cocteau’s Gothic fantasy La Belle et la Bête (1946), Thorold Dickenson’s Gaslight (1940), and Joan Fontaine in her last big-screen appearance in the Hammer production The Witches (1966).

On 9 October 2015, there will be a special screening of three new 35mm prints of films by the Brothers Quay, alongside a new short by Christopher Nolan featuring the twin filmmakers ever inspiring work. Plus, in the Experimenta strand, Anthology Film Archives offer a sampler programme of an eclectic array of artists active in New York City from 1975-1990.

For more information about the programme and how to book tickets visit the LFF website.

Pamela Jahn

The Electric Sheep Film Show September 2015

VivreEnsemble
Lobby card for Anna Karina's lost film Vivre Ensemble (1973)

audio In the September Electric Sheep Film Show, Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch preview the London Film Festival and talk to filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond, whose short film NASTY is screening as part of the Cult section. Sight & Sound production editor Isabel Stevens joins them to talk about the new Female Gaze issue of the magazine. Plus an interview with Guy Maddin (recorded at the Berlinale in February 2015), whose latest, The Fobidden Room, is showing at LFF; and an extract from William Fowler’s lecture on guerrilla filmmaker Antony Balch at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.

The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 8-9pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 21 October 2015.

This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 16 September 2015.

Clear Spot – 16 September 2015 (Electric Sheep) by Resonance Fm on Mixcloud

L’Etrange Festival 2015 Preview

EtrangeFestival2015_cropped
21st Etrange Festival poster by Dom Garcia

L’Etrange Festival

3-13 September 2015

Forum des Images, Paris, France

Etrange Festival website

The outlandish Parisian genre and fantasy festival returns from September 3 to 13 with another line-up bulging with wild, unhinged and lost treasures. The festival opens with Simon Pummel’s schizophrenic sci-fi thriller Brand New-U and closes with Bollywood epic Baahubali: The Beginning, with a full range of sleazy subversiveness and avant-garde strangeness in between, from Marcel L’Herbier’s restored 1924 art deco femme fatale tale L’inhumaine to Rolph de Heer’s grotesque family tale Bad Boy Bubby, not to forget a zombie all-nighter.

Highlights include the latest from three Japanese heavyweights: Takashi Miike’s Yakuza Apocalypse, Hideo Nakata’s Ghost Theater and Sion Sono with two films, Tag and Love and Peace. Also screening are The Blaine Brothers’ original and moving Nina Forever, Steve Oram’s category-defying Aaaaaaaah! and Ulrich Seidl’s exploration of Austrian cellars In the Basement.

We’ll be checking out Alex Van Varmerdam’s absurdist thriller La peau de Bax, Raúl Garcia’s Edgar Allan Poe animation film Extraordinary Tales, Michael Madsen’s speculative alien invasion documentary The Visit, experimental Afghanistan-set sci-fi Ni le ciel ni la terre directed by artist Clément Cogitore, and Jason Bognacki’s slick giallo-influenced tale of possession Another.

This year, the guest curators are Guy Maddin (also included in the main programme with his own The Forbidden Room), whose selection includes Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Teuvo Tulio’s Sensuela and George Kuchar’s The Devil’s Cleavage; Benoit Delepine, co-director of Aaltra and Mammuth, will present Tim Burton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and hopeless Russian road movie The Joy; and Ben Wheatley has chosen Frantisek Vlacil’s sumptuous medieval fable Marketa Lazarova and Michael Mann’s legendary murky Nazi nightmare The Keep.

Documentaries include Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World, B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin (1979-1989), which features Blixa Bargeld and Nekromantik 2’s male lead Mark Reeder, as well as an exploration of the Turkish golden age of low-budget Hollywood remakes, Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, part of a focus on alternative Turkish cinema.

This year’s musical performance is truly exceptional: legendary masked industrial collective The Residents will play a new version of Shadowland as well as presenting a programme of films and documentary Theory of Obscurity: A Movie about The Residents.

As always, the line-up includes a vast and dynamic selection of shorts, ranging from Can Evrenol’s hard-hitting, gut-punching Baskin and Javier Chillon’s inventive, intelligent Die Schneider Krankheit to classics by Jaume Balaguero, Jonathan Caouette and Bill Morrison.

For the full programme and to book tickets plesae visit the Etrange Festival website.

Modern silent movies

La Antena
La Antena

audio Alex Fitch and Virginie Sélavy talk about the phenomenon of modern silent movies (or rather films without dialogue), inspired by the release of the new Argentine fantasy movie La Antena. Other films discussed include early surrealist films, the work of Guy Maddin and the last film written by Ed Wood, I Woke up Early the Day I Died. The episode was recorded at Resonance FM by Robin Warren.

For details of the various formats in which you can download/stream the podcast, visit archive.org


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Links:
Review of La Antena on Electric Sheep