By Greg Dolgopolov
The 50th Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia is seriously fantastic. This genre film festival in the small seaside town 35kms down the coast from Barcelona is one of the great fantasy film festivals in the world, showcasing the latest genre developments in horror, fantasy and sci-fi, highlighting daring initiatives, major productions as well as smaller independent gems.
Sitges is a founding member of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation, established in 1987 as a network of 22 genre film festivals from 16 countries, which is the biggest film network dedicated to supporting fantasy films amongst dedicated fans. Sitges screens more than 250 films across 7 screening venues and 27 virtual reality pieces. More than 100 guests paraded down 3,500 meters of red carpet, featuring more than 366,752 fangs, 1,200,000 litres of blood and at least a 10% increase on last year’s box office – this is a seriously big festival.
NOW AND THEN
Sitges Film Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary with a monster program that looks back at its fine history and looks forward to the best in genre and fantastical cinema. One of the directors who has become synonymous with Sitges is Guillermo del Toro who was the patron of the festival with his brilliant The Shape of Water the Opening Night film. Del Toro opened the 2006 festival with Pan’s Labyrinth. He first visited Sitges in 1993 when he picked up the award for Best Screenplay for Cronos, his debut feature.
The festival also commemorated Dracula, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the version by Francis Ford Coppola as well as running movie marathons of the various iterations of the story by a host of different directors from around the world.
The festival is genuinely embraced by the town with virtually every shop in the windy narrow streets featuring some aspect of the fantastic in their window displays, street performances every night plus a huge Zombie Walk. For a small town there is a surprising abundance of venues – four screens that were active from 8am to 3am every day ranging from 150 seater thematically appropriate repurposed abattoirs to the grand Auditori with its 1400 seats which when it was built in 1992 was the biggest in the Mediterranean.
The festival was a huge success with full-houses smashing previous records with a 10% increase in ticket sales in 2017. What is noteworthy is the audience – they are genre aficionados, astute, dedicated fans that know all the major directors’ oeuvres and cheer wildly for the films that they love. They are passionate and knowledgeable.
THE AUSTRALIAN PRESENCE
Australians have had a long involvement at Sitges that recognised our commitment to genre movies in the 1970s. The best year for Australian films came in 1978 when Australian films dominated the awards night with Long Weekend crowned the Best Film; Richard Franklin picking up the Best Director award for Patrick and John Hargreaves receiving the Best Actor Award for his role in the Long Weekend.
While no Australian films picked up an award at this year’s festival, there was an extraordinary presence: Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child was in competition for the Best Film and new films Rabbit, Hounds of Love, Killing Ground, Boys in the Trees, Bloodlands and Sheborg Massacre attracting sell out houses across multiple screenings.
Short films were well represented including Smashed, Last Tree Standing, Daemonrunnner, and Creeper, however there were no VR entries in what was otherwise an excellent program. This significant presence goes some way to highlighting the international recognition and respect for Australian genre film and the audience’s genuine interest in Australian material.
THE AWARD WINNERS
Traditionally, the Sitges award winners are far from arthouse or mainstream fare, featuring films that largely do not get a look-in at other major festivals. That is the advantage of a specialist fantasy festival – curating lively material unavailable elsewhere and especially in such a large dosage. Going against expectations, however, the award winner this year was a film that was in competition at Cannes earlier this year and was comparatively conservative in comparison to the other films. In a large field of competition films judged by an international jury, Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó was awarded the Best Feature Length Film for Jupiter’s Moon, an existential thriller driven by a Muslim refugee story that explored the impact of modern day miracles in a Christian parable for Europe’s present humanitarian crisis. The stunning production design was noted with Jupiter’s Moon also picking up the award for Best Visual Effects.
The films that attracted awards this year seemed to find a balance between the auteur-driven, arthouse genre with supernatural elements and the fantastical. The award for best direction went to French director Coralie Fargeat for her stunning debut film Revenge, a stylish rape-revenge horror thriller about three men who go hunting but one of the men brings his girlfriend and that causes no end of trouble as the hunted becomes the hunter. Fargeat also won the Citizen Kane Award for Best New Director.
French-Brazilian As Boas Maneiras (aka Good Manners) directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra won the Critics Award. The Special Jury Award went to the Norwegian supernatural drama Thelma that echoes Brian de Palma’s Carrie and revolves around a young woman falling in love while discovering telekinetic powers. Directed and written by Joachim Trier, it is a fable about the power of the mind. It will be Norway’s entry for the foreign-language film Oscar.
Catalan filmmakers Albert Pintó and Casas Caye received the award for best short film for R.I.P and the Audience Appreciation Award went to the locally produced religious and family drama farce, Matar a Dios (God is Dead). The Critics’ Award went to the master of Greek weird Yorgos Lanthimos for The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Two films that drew considerable audience attention and solved that complex equation of blending the fantasy genre, low budgets with high concepts and that rare ingredient – comedy, were Dave Made a Maze by Bill Watterson which won the New Visions Award. Equally funny and deeply moving was a variation on the Kaspar Hauser story, but with a more developed explication of the post traumatic incident aftermath, Brigsby Bear. This was the winner of the Best Feature Length Film Discovery. Both films were painfully honest, moving and at the same time fantastically inventive.
A film that seemed entirely out of place in the entire festival – the superb archival documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, a film about the recovery of Canada’s lost silent film archive that was found buried underneath an ice-rink at a small former gold mining town at the end of the line won the New Visions Plus Best Feature Length Film award. It did have some fire and exploitation scenes but otherwise it was as far from the festival themes as could be imagined and yet, strangely, it felt entirely appropriate.
However, the films that won the awards were not necessarily the ones celebrated by audiences. The stunning Estonian film November, set in pagan community and full of all manner of spirits and ghouls presented a remarkable vision into the folk gothic that was at once mesmerisingly original, moody, inventive and deeply erotic. Brimstone and Errementari (El Herrero y El Diablo) were roundly acknowledged by audiences as something special. Movies generating a buzz on social networks included Takashi Miike’s superb samurai epic Blade of the Immortal and Takeshi Kitano’s final instalment in his trilogy, Outrage Coda attracted considerable social media buzz.
STRUCTURE
The festival has a no-nonsense structure with the traditional festival glamour coming second to zombie costumes and Grateful Dead tees. Nonetheless, the stars did make appearances without too much hoopla. Lifetime Achievement Grand Honorary Awards went to Johnnie To (Three, Vengeance), Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, William Friedkin and Frank Langella; whilst the cast of Stranger Things received a warm reception as did festival favourite son, Del Toro. But otherwise it is very much an anti-glamour festival.
Sitges has a remarkable festival structure. It balances competition films alongside classic retrospectives, innovative new works from emerging artists with previews of genre-relevant TV series such as Stranger Things and the new Spanish series La Zona; it showcases VR and presents free family events which is admittedly difficult for a genre festival heavily laden with blood, vampires and all manner of ghouls.
An issue that bedevils most film festivals is the fans’ agony of having the finalists announced on the final night and for the majority of festivalgoers at large events missing out on seeing those films because of scheduling or bad luck or timing is cause for loud howling. One of the standout features of the Sitges Festival is the Sunday Movie Marathon. The festival award winners are announced on Saturday and at the same time the movie marathons are announced as well – these start at 9am and go through to about 2am the following day with the Best Film of the festival featuring seemingly indiscriminately in various cinemas throughout the day. This is a true fan’s festival and this chaotic scramble makes perfect sense. Amazingly, all the venues are packed and people really do go through from dawn to dawn hardly taking timeouts for smokos, drinks and meal breaks as the films keep going at a relentless pace and no one wants to miss an award winner.
The outstanding thing about the Sitges audience is that they are hardcore 100% committed fans. They cheer the festival trailer, applaud when the title of the film comes up, hoot the director’s name, applaud the “wow” moments in a film, offer heartfelt and genuine applause at the end whether the filmmaker is there or not, never eat in the cinemas, or check their mobiles phones – this is a totally dedicated, respectful and highly knowledgeable audience predominately clad in black t-shirts emblazoned with cult cinema gory logos.
Next year, the 51st edition Sitges Fest will pay tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 50 years on, so make sure you book your tickets – this is a festival not to be missed.
