Cinema is Dope

With new titles like Sauna, Just Another Love Story, Dead Snow and older Hong Kong Category III titles like Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Electrical Girls, and some older William Castle titles, the 9th NIFFF in Neuchatel, Switzerland, comes roaring to life with a festival slate guaranteed to offer up one hell of a wild and very fantastic ride. This early sneak peek offers up just 3 of its main focuses this year: Scandinavian genre cinema; William Castle; Hong Kong Category III cinema. There is still a massive list of features, shorts and sections yet to be announced. No idea if I’ll be able to make it yet or not again out to it. NIFFF 2009, we are off to a great start! Full press release below.

Related Coverage:
::: NIFFF Official Site
::: Tribute to NIFFF (Cinema is Dope)

THE 9TH NEUCHATEL INTERNATIONAL FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL (NIFFF)
JUNE 30th – JULY 5th 2009

The 9th edition of the Neuchatel Fantastic Film Festival will take place from Tuesday June 30 to Sunday July 5 2009. If the complete program will only be disclosed to the public on June 12, three exceptional programs can already be revealed now: a retrospective honouring the earthy American producer William Castle; a tribute to the fiendish Category III of the Hong Kong film industry; a special program devoted to the current cinematographic events of the Scandinavian genre cinema.

For its 9th edition, the NIFFF will celebrate again the vitality of the international fantastic cinema with about 100 unreleased films, four official competitions, Open Air projections, but also with a Symposium dedicated to the image new technologies and numerous festive events, including the possibility of meeting prestigious guests. During 6 days, the NIFFF will explore the history and the news of a genre cinema which is paradoxically as popular as unknown.

WILLIAM CASTLE, A VISIONARY ILLUSIONIST
In his prolix career, William Castle, in turn, directed, produced and acted in about fifty movies, but he became legendary mainly due to his vocation to frighten the audience by all possible means. In the late fifties, spurred on by the ambition to both challenge the competition of TV and to ensure the success of his movies, he developed the most far-fetched promotion strategies of the cinema history by turning the projections into real fairground attractions: glasses with supernatural powers (13 Ghosts, 1960), vibrating seats (The Tingler, 1959) or even a decisive vote from the spectators to seal the hero’s fate (Mr. Sardonicus, 1961). Through a program including the re-creation of some of these sensational effects, the NIFFF invites the audience to dive into a golden age in which the movie show was at the same time on the screen and in the screening room. The festival offers here a unique occasion to discover the hits of this skilful producer who opened the way for cult phenomenon such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

CATEGORY III: TRANSGRESSION MADE IN HONG-KONG
Corresponding to our “not allowed for audience under 18” rating, the fiendish Category III appeared in Hong Kong in 1988 and was intended to allow the broadcast of movies with a tendentious content (violence, sex, politics) that were until then purely and simply censored. As a result of this rating category institution, a totally transgressive production was quickly generated then and blew up all genres and aesthetic norms, expressing excessively the Honk Kong life style of the late 20th century. From the wild Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky by Ngai Kai Lam (1991) to the licentious Electrical Girls by Bowie Lau (2001), the NIFFF offers an exceptional selection of the most striking Category III movies, mixing explosive eroticism, brutality and Chinese humour.

COLD SWEAT: CONTEMPORARY SCANDINAVIAN GENRE CINEMA
By considering that the fantastic genre renewal in Europe was only the work of a handful of inspired Spanish directors, one forgets probably a little too fast the wind of freshness that has blown from Scandinavia on genre cinema in the last years. The Bothersome Man by Jens Lien, You the Living by Roy Anderson and also Let the Right One In by Tomas Alfredson, all of them awarded movies at the NIFFF in the three previous editions, testify of the surprising vitality of the Northern cinema that offers today one of the most original productions worldwide. With a few unreleased movies such as the hypnotic Sauna by the Finish director Antti-Jussi Annila, the striking dark movie Just Another Love Story by the Danish prodigy Ole Bornedal or also Dead Snow, a bloody and snow-covered farce by Tommy Wirkola, the NIFFF offers this year a journey to the heart of a far too unknown Scandinavian genre cinema.