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Sitges Film Festival 2014

cartell_sitges_2014
Sitges 2014

Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia

3-12 October 2014

Sitges, Spain

Sitges website

The 47th edition of the long-standing Catalan genre film festival offered an amazing selection of fantastical cinema, an impressive list of guests, fun midnight screenings and a great zombie parade, all in a beautiful seaside setting.

Among the highlights at Sitges this year were horrific post-Spanish Civil War sisterly drama Shrew’s Nest, produced by Alex de la Iglesia, Sergio Caballero’s sci-fi oddity La distancia, excellent neo-giallo The Editor, Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed dark comedy The Voices, Dumplings director Fruit Chan’s latest film The Midnight After and intense Belgian serial killer thriller The Treatment.

Although this year’s edition opened with the disappointing fourth instalment of the [REC] franchise, excitement soon flared up again with the well-executed Belgian boyscout slasher Cub, which had an interesting multi-antagonist set-up and ingenious death traps. Also showing on the first weekend, the remarkably disturbing Creep was an American thriller about a terminally ill man who hires a cameraman to make a film for his unborn son. With sophisticated tone shifts and immaculate, taut direction, it was a deeply unsettling exploration of insanity and sexuality.

The programme also included some of our festival favourites: creepy and poignant Australian monster tale The Babadook, Scandinavian droll crime thriller In Order of Disappearance, energetic Cannon Films documentary Electric Boogaloo, dreamy vampire tale A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, sci-fi-tinged marital horror Honeymoon, thoughtful Irish ghost story The Canal, Russian sci-fi epic Hard to Be a God, Korean crime thriller A Hard Day, subversive erotic comedy Wetlands, fantastical masterwork It Follows, not forgetting Fabrice du Welz’s take on the Lonely Hearts killers, Alleluia.