A Vibrant and Vampiric Sunday Against Social Stigma
The Auditorium was bathed in pink with the arrival of Eduardo Casanova. The director of such subversive films as Pieles and Piety, presented at Sitges 2022, aroused passions with his wonderful new production. Silence isn't just an ode to marginalization and otherness. It's also pure queer cinema against serophobia. In addition, Sitges was abuzz with the arrival of stimulating films including Alberto Vázquez's Decorado, Genki Kawamura's Exit 8, Alberto Gastesi's Singular, and Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck.
A Town Called Dante's Freak
Surrounded by fans of all ages, maestro Joe Dante, an indispensable figure in the horror comedy canon of the 1980s and 1990s, returned to the Festival that has long celebrated his filmography as a cornerstone of fantastic genre moviemaking. His delightful and quirky Small Soldiers won the awards for Best Special Effects and Best Soundtrack in 1998. Dante returned to Sitges years ago to receive the Time Machine Award, and now he's back as the great father of some of the most iconic creatures in contemporary cinema to be honored once again, as we already announced, with the Grand Honorary Award.
Applauded by the audience in the Auditorium, the director expressed his gratitude for the award to a Festival that has been with him for decades. Immediately afterwards, the lights were dimmed to show one of this year's most gamified offerings. This was the claustrophobic time-loop thriller Exit 8, directed by Genki Kawamura and starring an entirely Japanese cast, inspired by the original single-setting video game of the same name that won the award for best new game at the 2024 Japan Games Awards.
The endless underground passageway that players had to navigate in the game, always on the lookout for any anomalies they might encounter along the way, was transformed into this fascinating minimalist science fiction film. With Exit 8, we could well be talking about the next Japanese cult classic. To top it off, this film is distributed by the iconic Toho, the company behind classics such as Akira and Seven Samurai, and it genuinely unsettled viewers with its approach to horror as a liminal space, with echoes of Vincenzo Natali's geometric Cube.
Something's Rotting in Tasmania
For Zak Hilditch, horror and drama are two sides of the same coin. His thrilling We Bury the Dead was a pleasant surprise for viewers who were only expecting a bloody zombie experience, a subgenre to which, in Hilditch's own words, “it's very difficult to add anything new.” However, the Australian director and screenwriter managed to make the most of the intimate and redemptive dimension of the tragic story he tells in an apocalyptic Tasmania, where a failed army experiment has caused the deaths of hundreds of people.
The young widow played by Daisy Ridley searches for her missing husband amid the catastrophe. According to Hilditch, the film “rests on Ridley's shoulders,” the highly acclaimed heroine of the latest Star Wars trilogy who, on this occasion, plays a survivor in full mourning in scenes that fluctuate between the tension caused by the undead and the sadness that unfolds in interior spaces.
It's no coincidence that the basis for this bloody story, where “death is everywhere,” comes from the director's own experience. In 2017, he lost a loved one and knows what it means to “pack up a whole lifetime of memories” in the rooms of an empty house, as a “cathartic process.” The writing of We Bury the Dead is imbued with these emotions to construct a family horror drama that, despite all the deaths it harbors, manifests a powerful will to live.
The Possibilities of AI
This morning, Patricia López Arnaiz said that reading the script for Singular for the first time was “like a sensory journey, like a scent that lingers for days and leaves its mark.” Something similar happened to Javier Rey, who, as the days went by, “returned to the text to discover new interpretations.” These statements by the lead actress and actor kicked off the press conference for the intriguing new film from director Alberto Gastesi, who confessed his desire to approach the project as “a playful experience through psychological thriller and science fiction, playing with their codes to turn them upside down.”
Arnaiz and Rey play an ex-couple who decide to meet up again at an old house by the lake twelve years after the death of their son. She, a specialist in artificial intelligence, and he, a man who has distanced himself from civilization, are confronted with the unexpected arrival of an enigmatic young man who will bring old secrets to light. The most interesting thing about this premise is that, underlying its appearance, lies a true narrative labyrinth co-written by Gastesi and “his dance partner,” screenwriter Álex Merino, where science fiction is ultimately revealed “as a wonderful apparition” in a project that, according to the director, draws on the idea of loops and obsession, inspired by the work of Ray Bradbury, the bizarreness of Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s handling of intrigue and atmosphere in the magnificent Cure.
Singular is a film produced in collaboration with RTVE, co-produced by Spain and Finland, and with the participation of Miguel Iriarte and Iñigo Gastesi in the cast.
The Vázquez Show
"It's a mistake to consider short films as a stepping stone to feature films. In fact, it's the most suitable medium for animation." This was the opinion expressed by director and screenwriter Alberto Vázquez, creator of such exquisite works as Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children and Psiconautas, on the day he presented Decorado, his eagerly awaited third animated feature film, co-written with Francesc Xavier Manuel Ruiz, which expands on the narrative universe of his own short film of the same name, winner of a Goya award in 2016.
The film confirms the inventiveness of this multi-award-winning filmmaker as one of the most unique voices on the current fantastic genre scene in terms of stylistic identity. The audacity of his stories and characters, accompanied by a strong political and social metaphorical charge, have established Vázquez as a great auteur of adult animation, with the doors always open to him at the Sitges Film Festival.
Decorado places us within the intense gaze of Arnold, a middle-aged mouse caught up in an existential crisis who begins to suspect that his entire environment is, in fact, a huge farce.
Halfway between classic and modern character design, between Mickey Mouse and a contemporary reinterpretation of ghosts and monsters, Vázquez has conjured up different mythologies to create a fascinating tale of self-discovery where the mysteries of otherness intermingle with black comedy. In other words, Decorado is “a journey of everyday paranoia in a desperate flight towards something that resembles, even if only a little, freedom.” This powerful portrait of melancholy allows Vázquez to explore the search for love in a society where people wear masks to interact with each other. If in the stark anti-war fable Unicorn Wars, winner of a Goya award and presented at Sitges 2022, denounced “faith and religion as tools of control” in a savagely apocalyptic world, his new film uses dystopian narrative in the Orwellian tradition and in a classic like The Truman Show to defend the intimate landscape that exists within each of us.
Vampiresses Against the HIV Stigma
Radical, poignant, and subversive, but also humanistic and inclined toward the most twisted forms of beauty, the work of Eduardo Casanova is like a colossal ode to difference that is unafraid to film it head-on, imbued with pastel pink. From Pieles, his fierce debut feature about marginal identities and non-normative bodies, to films as disturbingly and suffocatingly audacious as Piety, presented at Sitges 2022, and Al margen, one of the most powerful documentaries about mental health in recent years; Casanova has positioned himself as one of the most radical auteurs on the Spanish scene in his defense of alterities, possessed by the rebelliousness of masters such as John Waters and the early Pedro Almodóvar.
Today, Casanova returned to Sitges like a punk rock star, accompanied by his fantastic team of creators, to present his latest delight. Presented in the Official Fantàstic Selection, Silencio is a baroque queer tragicomedy in miniseries format about vampire sisters who survive as best they can amid the scarcity of “clean human blood” due to the ravages of the Black Death in Europe. Centuries later, one of them faces the AIDS pandemic in Spain, stigmatized as the “pink plague of the 80s,” an expression that Casanova would like to defend as a symbol of empowerment. HIV, as he stated at a press conference attended by Leticia Dolera and Jordi Évole, “is a pandemic that is still ongoing and continues to silence many people today.” The filmmaker added that “it's very difficult for people who suffer from it to break through the taboo and come out,” and referred to the sad news that there are currently several countries where HIV-positive people are not allowed to travel.
In a way, Casanova hopes and wishes that, with the premiere of Silencio on Movistar Plus+ on December 1st, World AIDS Day, his new production will “bring courage to those who suffer from it.” It's no coincidence that the extravagant makeup worn by the leading ladies, played by talents of the stature of Lucía Díez, María León, Ana Polvorosa, and the aforementioned Leticia Dolera, is inspired, as he has confirmed, by the physical changes experienced by some people affected by HIV.
Italian Ghosts, Time Loops, and the Best Happy Feet of the Year
Likewise, the intense Sunday we celebrated served to honor films that are very different from each other, but united under the same umbrella of the Festival. The Life of Chuck, directed by Mike Flanagan, adapts Stephen King's novel of the same name about three interrelated stories revolving around the hypnotic character of Charles Krantz, played by an unbridled Tom Hiddleston, star of this year's best street dance scene.
And from the United States we traveled to Canada to finally enjoy a film that was promoted by our Festival through the Sitges FanPitch initiative. Directed by Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, Lucid is a stimulating dreamlike journey filmed in 35 mm and Super-8 about an art student who decides to combat her artistic block with a magical elixir that generates lucid dreams. However, this concoction also unleashes dark monstrosities that inhabit the subconscious.
The screening, which was a huge success with audiences at the Escorxador Theater, was attended by the directing duo along with actresses Caitlin Acken Taylor and Jo Gaffney, who held a Q&A session following the screening, answering insightful questions about its filming and editing process.
Equally noteworthy was the screening of The Ghost, presented by restorer and producer David Gregory in a restoration carried out by Severin Films. This rarity from 1960s Italian cinema, directed by Riccardo Freda and starring Barbara Steele, Roger Corman's eternal muse in The Pit and the Pendulum and Mario Bava's muse in Black Sunday, delighted Sitges' most film-loving audience with a delightful ghost story.