Sitges 2014 to Open with [REC]4: APOCALYPSE: Watch The New Trailer!

Director Jaume Balagueró was on hand today at the Sitges Film Festival press conference, to present the first trailer for the last film in the [REC] franchise. [REC]4: Apocalypse is set to open the festival, which will run October 3rd - 12th. Other film announcements are The Distance, the second feature from Catalan director Sergio Caballero, which will be in the official selection; and Lee Sujin's Han Gong-ju will open the New Visions category.

An exciting addition to the festival this year is Blood Window, created in alliance with the Ventura Sur market. It's a new category dedicated to emerging Latin American fantastic cinema, and it will include a new award for Best Latin American Fantastic Genre Production. Excerpts from the press release about the announced films, the new category, and the theme of this year's poster:

Sitges 2014 will be opening on October 3^rd with the eagerly awaited [REC]4 Apocalypse, directed by Jaume Balagueró and starring Manuela Velasco again in the role of reporter Ángela Vidal. The movie is currently in its post-production stage and was filmed in Barcelona, Terrassa, Gijón and the Canary Islands during seven intense and tough weeks of work, including scenes out at sea. This film directed by Balagueró and produced by Julio Fernández for Filmax, with the participation of TVE, Canal + and in collaboration with TV3, will be opening a Festival anxiously awaiting the saga's final sequence.

[REC]4 Apocalypse kicks off at the point where Ángela Vidal, the only survivor of the terrible infection, is evacuated from the building. When the situation finally appears to be under control, chaos prevails once again and the seed of evil takes on new and horrible forms.

Sitges will also include another eagerly awaited Catalan production in its Official Selection, which is totally connected to its artistic line: The Distance, Sergio Caballero's second feature film, produced by Advanced Music, Sònar Festival and Arcadia Motion Pictures. The Distance is the story of a heist that combines suspense and science fiction and uses touches of surreal humor, making it a highly intriguing and subversive movie. The film approaches the story of an introverted peasant from Crimea who goes to work in the Siberian coal mines where he becomes the owner of a power station.

The Noves Visions category will be opening with the Korean Han Gong-ju, by Lee Sujin, a big hit at the recent Rotterdam and Deuville festivals. Han Gong-ju is a film containing unusually intense, transgressive elements and which is considered one of the best Korean dramas in the last ten years.

Among the new elements at the festival is its alliance with the fantastic cinema brand created by the Ventura Sur market: Blood Window. This new category will be dedicated to the emerging fantastic cinema produced in Latin American and will have a mainly cross-sectional nature; in other words, it will bring together the productions from this continent selected in the Festival's different categories. This space will also have room for films from the category itself, as well as possible retrospective-type programs. An international jury will present the award for best Latin American fantastic genre production.

This year Sitges recovers the universe based on oneiric horizons as a source of creative inspiration. Given the dissolution of the limits between the real and the virtual worlds, the Festival explores the multiple options that fantastic cinema has to offer in this field. The Festival's leitmotiv this year are dreams and their heterogeneous rendering in the audiovisual field, that will be crystallized in Sitges in the form of a retrospective and the release of a specific publication.This is contained and expressed in the Sitges 2014 poster, made, once again this year, by the CHINA Agency under the executive creative direction of Rafa Antón and the creative direction of Miguel Ángel Duo. The poster, with the emblematic image of the Sitges church (known as The Point) in the background, portrays a blindfolded boy holding a bunch of balloons made of eyes in motion under a dog's watchful eye.

The trailer for [REC]4: Apocalypse is below. It appears that the found footage mode has officially been abandoned, as it was in the previous [REC] film, but in my opinion the series doesn't need it anymore. It looks amazing! Watch it below, along with some pictures from the film and The Distance.