Calgary Underground Film Festival Announces 22nd Edition Lineup and Events!
Like Calgary in April, you never quite know what you are going to get at the Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF). It could be sunny T-shirt weather one day, and a punishing snow storm the next, the Northern Lights peeking past the city lights, or three dudes having a naked fist fight in front of an all night McDonalds. It pays to keep your eyes open, and your head up.
The festival's programming is equally as varied, from culty fan-made docs to ethereal experimental dreamscapes to vintage cartoons to slickly produced but deceptively sly comedies.
The 22nd edition of CUFF runs from April 17*-27 at the charming, pair-stacked Globe Cinema, opening with Andrew DeYoung's cringe-comedy Friendship (featuring Tim Robinson, who has a bromance with Paul Rudd go way, way off the rails) and closes with Eli Craig's horror-comedy Clown in a Cornfield (on a double bill with the 15th anniversary of Craig's dense and referential and charming Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil).
Other highlights include Joel Potrykus' gut-wrenching Vulcanizadora; Calvin Lee Reeder's gory body horror The A-Frame; a Finnish documentary on a cult that lives in the French Pyrenees, Shadowland, which inadvertently exposes the ills of director Richard Stanley; the spectacular space romance from Ukraine, U Are The Universe; the loving Ed Wood spoof/tribute, Vampire Zombies From Space; and Joanne Mitchell's Goth-ish character study, Broken Bird.
Also, the latest from The Greaser Strangler director Ebony and Ivory; the sumptuously produced Kafkaesque nightmare, Mr. K, starring a perfectly cast Crispin Glover; avant-garde video weirdos of Reveries: The Mind Prison (from the talent behind two of my favourite films from last years CUFF, Cash Cow, and Dad & Stepdad, also narrated by Steven Wright); and Eephus, Carson Lund's Wiseman-esque amateur baseball hang-out movie (with Frederick Wiseman actually in the cast), infused with the tone of Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn.
