L’Etrange Festival 2011: Preview

L’Etrange Festival

2-11 September 2011, Forum des Images, Paris

L’Etrange Festival website

Created in 1993 by musicien, producer, journalist and cinephile Frédéric Temps to give audiences the possibility to discover neglected works and filmmakers, L’Etrange Festival returns with another selection of outlandish and unconventional gems.

Asian cinema is making a strong showing with Tetsuya Nakashima’s masterfully misanthropic Confessions, the affecting, brutal Chinese thriller Revenge: A Love Story, Sion Sono’s latest, the perverse Guilty of Romance, in which two women look for love in all the wrong places and pay the price, as well as his previous Cold Fish, a darkly funny, gory crime drama set in the world of tropical fish retailing, and Korean crime thriller The Unjust, scripted by Park Joon-hung, who wrote I saw the devil.

The programme also includes Tory Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, produced by Guillermo del Toro, Lucky McKee’s vitriolic and controversial The Woman, efficient vampire road movie Stake Land, Xavier Gens’s claustrophobic sci-fi thriller The Divide, as well as a selection of works by animation pioneer Winsor McCay with live piano score by Serge Bromberg, short films and numerous oddities from the past.

There are special focuses on Rutger Hauer and Belgian director Koen Mortier, who shocked critics and audiences alike with Ex-Drummer, while Jean-Pierre Mocky, Liliana Cavani and Julien Temple curate strands of films. They will be in attendance at the festival, as well as many other guests.

In music events, Marc Caro rescores his and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1981 short film Le bunker de la dernière rafale, Tuxedomoon soundtrack Pink Narcissus and Boyd Rice provides a new soundtrack for John Parker’s Dementia.

For the full programme and to book tickets, go to L’Etrange Festival website.