The 17th Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival will take place from 20 to 29 September 2024. After unveiling the poster paying tribute to the Australian New Wave and Australian exploitation cinema (Ozploitation), the Festival is pleased to announce the first titles in the official selection.
In the International Fantastic Film Competition, the Festival will present Animale, the first genre film by the Franco-Algerian director Emma Benestan. Set in the world of Camargue bullfighting, it closed Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival. After presenting his debut feature Luz, the German director Tilman Singer will return with his eagerly-awaited horror movie Cuckoo, set in a strange hotel in the German Alps. Handling the Undead, by the Norwegian director Thea Hvistendahl, adapts Swedish author John Lindqvist’s novel of the same name, with considerable emotion and masterful direction. I Saw the TV Glow by director Jane Schoenbrun focuses on two teenagers living on the margins of society who are captivated by a strange TV programme. Finally, festival-goers will have the opportunity to see Timestalker, a romantic comedy by the British actress Alice Lowe, in which she plays a woman who travels back in time to find the man she loves in different eras.
In the International Crossovers Competition, devoted to genre films in the broadest sense of the term, the Festival will be presenting the French premiere of Joshua Erkman’s A Desert, a horrific neo-noir set in the desert of the American south-west. In the hypnotic and masterfully directed Body Odyssey, the Italian director Grazia Tricarico tells the story a bodybuilder and her trainer in their quest for beauty and perfection. Dead Mail, a truly unidentified filmic object by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, follows a lost mail specialist as he investigates a strange cry for help in the American Midwest. Kidnapping Inc., by the Haitian director Bruno Mourral, is a black comedy that accurately addresses the difficult situation in Haiti and instances of kidnapping. Finally, Sew Torn, a juicy thriller by the Swiss-American director Freddy Macdonald, is about an ingenious seamstress who has to put her talents to good use after unwittingly witnessing a drug deal.
In the International Animated Film Competition, the Festival will be presenting the thrilling Into the Wonderwoods by Vincent Paronnaud, aka Winshluss, and Alexis Ducord, adapted from Paronnaud’s comic strip of the same name. Having previously presented his debut feature Away at the Festival, Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis will be back with his captivating Flow, about a cat living with other animals on a boat, in the wake of a tidal wave, on a flooded Earth with no human beings. From Australia, Adam Elliot once again follows the lives of characters on the margins of society in Memoir of a Snail, a juicy black comedy made using modelling clay. The South Korean director Bum-wook Hur addresses the futility of being human in Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease, in which a pig wants to turn into a man and a man wants to become an animal. Finally, Spermageddon, by Tommy Wirkola and Rasmus A. Sivertsen, is a cross between a superhero film with spermatozoa and a sex-education lesson for teenagers.
In the Midnight Movies section, Chinese director Yang Li’s supercharged Escape from the 21st Century features 18-year-old students propelled 20 years into the future to save the world. In Grafted, a glamorous and gory body-horror debut feature by the New Zealand director Sasha Rainbow, a student assiduously continues the skin grafting work begun by her father. The New Kids Turbo team, Steffen Haars and Flip Van der Kuil, return with the wacky comedy Krazy House, a kind of sitcom on acid, with a freewheeling Nick Frost. Finally, we have Mr. Crocket, the American director Brandon Espy’s first feature, in which a mother tries to keep her son away from Mr. Crocket’s TV show as it seems to be having a harmful effect on him.
The full programme will be announced at the press conference on 3 September.