BIFFF: evil goings-on at Bozar

(Rigor Mortis)

As they did last year, upwards of 64,000 zombies, serial killers, and film buffs addicted to sci-fi parables are getting ready to take over Bozar. The BIFFF, the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, offers a sample of all the best that genre cinema has to offer. AGENDA has picked out a film from each section of the programme: from Álex de la Iglesia to The Zero Theorem.


WITCHING AND BITCHING
Álex de la Iglesia International Competition

This year, three personalities will be pressured by a roaring audience to sing a song as the BIFFF dubs them Knights in its Order of the Raven: Amélie Poulain director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Bond girl Caroline Munro, and Álex de la Iglesia. The Spanish iconoclast (El día de la bestia, Balada triste de trompeta) is not coming to Bozar empty-handed. In Witching and Bitching, a gang of crisis-hit losers makes off with 25,000 wedding rings from a pawnshop. Their flight takes them to a village full of feminist witches who take a dim view of men. Anyone mention “grand guignol”?


HIDE & SEEK
Jung Huh Thriller Competition

The BIFFF ploughed its way through over 1,000 genre films and finally arrived at a selection of 100. As it did so, the festival was struck by the fact that South Korean cinema had once again made quite an impression. Among the successors to Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) is Jung Huh, whose debut film is, we are told, a tightly directed, nerve-racking thriller about macabre, loathsome squatters who force their way into people’s homes. That’s what we call capitalising on elemental fears.


MISS CHRISTINA
Alexandru Maftei European Competition

For the most part, we only know Romanian cinema from stylish, analytical films that have made a splash at the A-festivals. But Vlad the Impaler’s homeland also produces genre films. Two examples will be in competition for the Méliès prize in Brussels. The Last Incubus introduces us to the incubus, an erotic demon who introduces young girls to pleasure. In Miss Christina, Alexandru Maftei sets out to popularise the Strigoi – tormented souls that have risen from the dead and are the basis of vampire mythology. The trailer promises a sumptuous, atmospheric film.


MOEBIUS
Kim Ki-duk 7^th Orbit Competition

Problem: Belgian distributors no longer distribute Kim Ki-duk’s films. Not even when, like Pieta, they win the Golden Lion in Venice. Solution: go along to the BIFFF. Fourteen years ago, the festival was one of the first to welcome this superb Korean film-maker. Mind you, Moebius doesn’t sound like easily digestible fare. A woman tries to castrate her unfaithful husband; when she doesn’t succeed, she attacks their son. The father feels guilty and tries everything to get him a new penis. Kim Ki-duk, who has recovered from a severe breakdown, has a reputation to live up to when it comes to the depiction of horrific violence. There is hardly any talking in the film.


THE ZERO THEOREM
Terry Gilliam Out of competition

Is he beginning to repeat himself? Can he not raise the budgets he needs to see his fantastic projects through? Is The Zero Theorem, as one reviewer has said, Brazil, except in colour and not as good? We don’t care: we always look forward to any film by Terry Gilliam. The director of 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas puts his film worlds together in such detail and with so much imagination that it is impossible to be bored. And Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Thierry, David Thewlis, Matt Damon, Ben Whishaw, and Tilda Swinton obviously feel the same way about it, as they are all to be seen in this parable about an eccentric genius in a future world controlled by all-seeing and all-knowing corporations.


RIGOR MORTIS
Juno Mak The Hong Kong Wave
In a rundown social-housing block in Hong Kong, a penniless actor rents the bewitched room 2442. He wants to make an end of it, but his bizarre fellow-residents keep getting in the way. A little later, rival vampires make their appearance. There is nothing special about that synopsis, but the trailer leads us to look forward to an atmospheric, visually accomplished film with good special effects. The first reviews have further encouraged suspicions that Rigor Mortis may turn out to be one of the BIFFF’s surprise packages. For his first feature film, the former pop star Juno Mak drew inspiration from the supernatural action films so popular with many Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s, whose coarse humour is said to have been replaced by a much darker, more forbidding tone.

THE GORGON
Terence Fisher Cinematek’s Hammer retrospective
Cinematek has got into a good habit of complementing the BIFFF. This year, it is doing so with a modest Hammer retrospective. The British studios became famous with their classic horror films in Technicolor such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. The Gorgon (1964) by the stylish Terence Fisher is an enjoyable, atmospheric gothic thriller. Christopher Lee investigates whether petrified bodies in a small Central European town are the work of Gorgons, monsters from Greek mythology. A local scholar, played by Peter Cushing, seems to know more. The ballerina Prudence Hyman got to play Hammer’s first female monster, with lurid green snakes in her hair.


BRUSSELS INTERNATIONAL FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL • 8 > 20/4, Bozar, rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.bifff.net