This Wednesday sees the start of the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, which has, over the years, become my most anticipated genre movie event of the year. Oh sure, I'd love to visit Cannes, Sitges, Neuchâtel, Brussels, and the US-based festivals, but my current way of life prevents me from leaving the Netherlands for more than a day to visit a festival. So this Dutch festival provides me with most of my genre fixes each year; it's a place where I see friends, buy cool books, and watch films.
It helps that Imagine always has a great line-up, and is never too proud to show a film or two which has basically played everywhere else already. For me, it's a chance to catch-up on titles I've heard everyone talk about here on Screen Anarchy, but I always end up making a few happy discoveries as well.
This year, the Imagine festival's theme is 'Fantastic Fashion', and there are lectures and workshops on costumes, masks, make-up... I expect to get some fantastic eye-fulls even outside the screening rooms when I visit the venue later this week.
The festival runs from the 12th till the 22nd of April, and here is a short list of recommendations on what's on display there. Do check out the full schedule, and feel free to tell me in the comments below what I missed!
On Wednesday the 12th of April, the festival opens with a screening of Jordan Peele's Get Out. This might seem a tad strange to readers on the West side of the Atlantic, as it had a very successful wide run there already, but hey... we haven't had it here yet, and we keep hearing so many great things about it!
More than a week later, Sarah Adina Smith's Buster's Mal Heart will be closing the festival. It's an intriguing mindfuck of a film, and in his review our Kurt called it "wonderfully weird and weirdly wonderful."
Benjamin Christensen's Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages is a famous and infamous film from 1922, a fictionalized history of (indeed) witchcraft through the ages.
A silent film this old would not be expected to shock or offend many, but director Christensen pulled no punches in his use of violence, nudity and special effects. Good ones too, considering its age: to this day, Häxan still manages to surprise people.
Being itself without sound, many of its releases have been accompanied with different scores. The Imagine festival will screen the newest restoration of the film, and will feature live music by artists Kinetophone.
This year, the theme is 'Fantastic Fashion', and to emphasize that, the festival has planned a number of events:
Esther Dorhout Mees and Jacob Kok are fashion designers who also make films, and they will show several filmclips, computer-generated virtual models and collections.
The program Fashion Shorts will show 17 short films, all based around fashion, by famous directors like Nicolas Winding Refn and Park Chan-wook.
There are masterclasses on creating costume concept art (by illustrator Luca Nemolato), on costume design (by designer Lindy Hemming), and on designing the look of zombies (by visual effects supervisor Staffan Linder).
Historian Tim Hanley will give a lecture on the different roles (and looks) of Wonder Woman through the decades.
There will be a symposium on the future of costume design, with several designers, artists and journalists present.
There are workshops on drawing superheroines (by Romano Molenaar), creating masks (by designer Carmen Schabracq), and how to do special Make-up (by artists from Kelatow FX).
Ben Wheatley's Free Fire is the most fun film I've seen so far this year, and it's playing at the Imagine festival. A group of Northern Irish terrorists are in Boston to illegally buy a load of rifles from a South African arms dealers, but when some of the bodyguards start a fight amongst themselves the situation escalates into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
Our Ryland Aldrich described it as such in his review: "The magic of Free Fire is that instead of siding with just one of the characters or groups of characters, you end up rooting for general mayhem instead. That's a fantastic thing considering this awesome movie is pretty much mayhem from beginning to end."
True words. And do try to pick a screening where director Ben Wheatley is present, as his Q&As are rightfully the stuff of legends.
On the 20th of April, writer/director Dario Argento will be visiting the festival for a career talk, and his films Suspiria and Opera will be theatrically shown.
The man has a bit of a reputation, to put it mildly, but the festival has honored him before and hopefully he'll be in a good mood. In any case, this should make for an extremely interesting event!
Saric Andreasyan's Russian superhero film Guardians looks absolutely sumptuous, based on its trailers, and the big question here is whether we're looking at another Avengers or another Fantastic Four.
Finding out will be fun though!
It's not all fashion at the festival: people have to eat too. There are several films which may affect your appetite a bit though...
Julia Ducournau's Raw (top picture) is about peer pressure, consent and cannibalism, and has been lauded aplenty by critics and audiences. In her review, Shelagh Rowan-Legg called it "...a unique and rare film, that will hopefully (and deservedly) find an audience beyond genre film fans."
Also playing is Xander Robin's Are We Not Cats, in which a guy falls in love with a girl who is addicted to eating her own hair, to the degree that she grows a trichobezoar big enough to possibly kill her. In her review, Michele "Izzy" Galgana calls the film "...a hair-pulling winner" and its director "...a bold new talent".
The Imagine festival has a pitching contest, and in 2015 this was won by Thijs Meuwese and Colinda Bongers, who envisioned a post-apocalyptic Dutch science fiction film starring a clumsy, nerdy female superhero. Fast forward two years, and we see the world premiere of the film they based on that pitch: Molly.
In the future, people stage elaborate pit-fights for betting purposes, and a group of mercenaries want to catch Molly to use her as a fighter. She keeps running away though, but when the bad people capture her daughter, Molly prepares an assault to get her back.
Fingers crossed this will be as much fun as the trailer makes it look!
Documentaries about the film business have always fared well at the festival, and this year two great ones are playing.
First we have Adam Nimoy's For the Love of Spock, in which he looks at his father Leonard, and the impact his portrayal of the famous vulcan had on his family. In her review, Shelagh Rowan-Legg calls the film "...a realistic yet endearing portrait of one of the great iconic characters, and the actor behind him, of our age."
Another documentary is of a more technical nature: Alexandre Philippe's 78 / 52 is a very, VERY meticulous look at the (in)famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The title refers to the 78 set-ups and 52 shots which were used in the making of the scene, which remains an absolute highlight of cinematic craft.
As each year, the festival leaves the main venue for one night and moves to another location for one huge horror party, and this year it's called the Fright Night. There will be quizzes, contests... and films. Going into the first day of Easter will surely be a fun affair when you join screenings of Colm McCarthy's new "zombie" classic The Girl With All The Gifts, Damien Powers' bleak Killing Ground, Craig Anderson's Red Christmas and, as a cherry on the cake, William Lustig's original 1980 Maniac (seen above).
The Imagine festival always features a few Asian action films, and this year is thankfully no exception.
The Mo Brothers' Headshot contains plenty of familiar faces of the The Raid films, and indeed this film is also action at its most brutal. In his review, Andrew Mack says the following: "When someone asks you what no holds barred action looks like you just point them in the direction of Headshot. Stand back and be prepared to pick up the pieces of their shattered souls."
We also get Dante Lam's jungle drug war actioner Operation Mekong. In his 2016 overview, James Marsh says that "Dante Lam returns to what he does best in blistering fashion with this high-octane action spectacular set in Asia’s Golden Triangle."
Few films have stuck with me this year as much as Amat Escalante's The Untamed, a scathing look at Mexican's macho culture by way of a tentacled sex-monster fallen from space. It's a bizarre film, and one of the most explicit ones I've seen in a while. A drama about domestic violence, using a mixture of H. P. Lovecraft's story The Color Out Of Space, David Cronenberg's Shivers, Andrzej Zulawski's Possession and the art of H. R. Giger.
In her review, Shelagh Rowan-Legg calls it "...a riveting and shocking examination of love, sex and violence among the working classes of Mexico, with a hefty side of erotic science fiction as a conduit for the character's fears and desires."