What The Film Festival 2018: Fourth Year of Eccentric Cinema Coming This March
It bears repeating. Here in Toronto we are blessed with an embarrassing abundance of cinematic experiences. Beyond the multiplexes hemorrhaging with the latest, popular fare, small strongholds like The Royal Cinema act as safe harbors and shelters for cinematic oddities and rarities.
But things get especially weird once a year when The Laserblast Film Society presents their What The Film Festival. Founders Peter Kuplowsky and Justin Decloux bomb our brains with the oddest of the odd, the weirdest of the weird. These are films that may otherwise have been lost into the ether had they not tickled the pleasure centers of Kuplowsky and Decloux's minds. As it is, being the generous lads that they are, they want to share their discoveries with their friends so make sure you have the penultimate weekend of March booked of to experience the fourth annual What The Film Festival.
The Laser Blast Film Society is proud to present the 4th edition of the What The Film Festival, an annual celebration of contemporary eccentric cinema.From March 24 to 25 at The Royal Cinema, this year’s festival not only promises five feature films, including two world premieres, but will also inaugurate the What The Film Bazaar presented by Arrow Video, a market floor for VHS tape-traders, indie comic collectors, underground artists, and vendors of obscure and cult cinema. The bazaar will take place steps away from the festival venue at The Monarch Tavern.Curated by TIFF Midnight Madness Programmer Peter Kuplowsky, along with local filmmaker Justin Decloux, What The Film Festival fills a gap in Toronto’s dense film festival landscape, showcasing outlier and outsider films that intersect definitions of both genre and avant-garde cinema and operate outside the traditional parameters of taste and convention. It is made possible in part by the funding support from Arrow Video and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.ANCHOR ZONE Dir. Andrée Pelletier / Canada / 2017 / 82 min / 35MM PRESENTATION!A young woman living in a dystopian St. John’s must enlist in the aid of skateboarding punks to find her father. The Laser Blast Film Society will celebrate this obscure Newfoundland sci-fi adventure on a rare 35mm print!GREEN HOUSE Dir. Armando Lamberti / USA / 2017 / 101 min / WORLD PREMIERE!A comic character study of a sneering manifestation of arrested adolescence gradually crescendos into a full-blown familial melodrama after a young man is forced to move in with estranged his half-sister. Indie filmmaking reminiscent of Hal Hartley or early Wes Anderson.JUNK HEAD Dir. Takahide Hori / Japan / 2017 / 114 min / TORONTO PREMIERE!An eight-years in the making stop-motion tour-de-force that’s as whimsical as Wallace and Gromit, but with the aesthetic predilections of H.R. Giger. It’s picaresque plot concerns a cybernetic explorer’s descent into the recesses of the Earth to recover ancient DNA that promises to restore fertility to the human race.THE LAPLACE’S DEMON Dir. Giordano Giulivi / Italy / 2017 / 109 min TORONTO PREMIERE!Scientists find themselves ensnared in a sinister game of fate where their every decision has been anticipated and engineered to systematically send them to their doom in this sci-fi noir shot entirely against rear-screen projections over seven years!MANGOSHAKE Dir. Terry Chiu / Canada/ 2018 / 97 min WORLD PREMIERE!An uproarious lo-fi labyrinth of suburban adolescent shenanigans over ‘one crazy summer’ that recalls the generational coming-of-age myths of Richard Linklater or George Lucas’s American Graffiti and introduces a bold and brilliant new Canadian filmmaker!
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