The European Fantastic Film Festival is back for its 19th edition from September 25 to October 4 and will be featuring a series of new international productions, some not shown before and others as preview screenings. The forty or so films that, as every year, will make up the official selection, will include the titles below, which might inspire you to take an extra week’s holiday.
In the international fantastic film competition, Sleep No More, a dark comedy horror movie by the Indonesian director Edwin, tackles the sensitive subject of workplace exploitation, featuring employees who become possessed by an entity when they are exhausted by their work. With Never After Dark, a Japanese production, Dave Boyle succeeds in combining a ghost story with a home invasion thriller by reimagining the character of the medium, thanks largely to a remarkable performance by the Japanese actress Moeka Hoshi. The Australian movie Leviticus by Adrian Chiarella features two teenagers grappling with a violent supernatural force that takes the form of the person they most desire.
In the Crossovers competition, Sidharta Tata’s breathtaking new Indonesian action film Ikatan Darah could be summed up as a female version of The Raid. The Taiwanese movie Dead End, a film noir by Chan Chun-Hao inspired by a true story, follows, over the course of a night of frantic pursuit, a disgraced former athlete who discovers a death betting ring where gamblers put money on the date of death of terminally ill patients. In The Good Boy, the Polish director Jan Komasa succeeds in blending a sequestration thriller with a dream-like tale of a couple who lock up a young delinquent in an attempt to expunge the evil inside him and put him back on the right track.
In the international animated film competition, Nobody, a Chinese production directed by Yu Shui, tells the story of ordinary characters – a little wild pig, accompanied by a toad, a weasel and a gorilla – who find the courage they need to become heroes during an eventful pilgrimage. From Brazil, Son of a Bitch by Erica Maradona, Tania Anaya, Otto Guerra and Sávio Leite follows the tumultuous journey of Ismael, who leaves his mother’s home in search of his father and the ocean, accompanied by his lame dog. With Blaise, Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue use paper cut-outs and digital photomontage to create a dark and absurd comic tale centred on the Sauvage family, whose members are obsessed with their image and whose son Blaise, spurred on by a young girl, embarks on a revolutionary crusade out of sheer politeness.
The Midnight Movies will add a touch of festive gore to the line-up, starting with Penny Lane is Dead by the Australian director Mia Kate Russell, a queer, punk slasher that harks back to the Ozploitation films of the 1980s. Having shown his debut feature, Der Bunker, at the Festival, the German director Nikias Chryssos marks his return with Bloody Tennis, a blend of horror comedy and the hallucinatory trip, set in an unorthodox tennis academy where only the most ferocious players will manage to survive. Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar returns to the international scene with Ghost in the Cell, which will delight his fans with his usual gory excesses, this time set in a high-security prison in which an entity slaughters the prisoners with the darkest auras.
Echoing our retrospective focusing on artificial intelligence, Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in The Machine sounds the alarm and shatters the hype surrounding AI by examining the philosophical, cultural and political foundations of the AI boom and the challenges we will all face in the future. Anthony Frith’s hilarious documentary Mockbuster takes us behind the scenes at The Asylum, a studio specialising in Sharknado-style B-movies, as we follow the chaotic journey of an Australian director who is asked to make a monster movie on a shoestring budget in just six days.