The /slash Film Festival 2019 will celebrate its 10th anniversary and clearly plans on doing so in style!
Descending on the Filmcasino, Metro Kinokulturhaus, and Gartenbaukino from September 19 up to and including the 29th, the 2019 edition seems to be its biggest one yet. With a mammoth lineup of 70 films (!) /slash underscores its reputation as Austria’s premiere fantastic film festival.
Other than the previously announced Female Terror retrospective and opening night film, The Lodge, this is truly a program full of eyecatchers both big and small.
Ninian Doff's Boyz in the Wood - a class satire that winningly mixes hip hop, disaffected youth and a manhunt set in the Scottish highlands - is a well-chosen slice of crowdpleasing entertainment with plenty of heart for closing night.
From Joe Begos’ splattery take on drugs and vampirism (Bliss) to Emma Tammi’s tale of frontier supernatural threats and psychological unravelling (The Wind), the /slash 2019 competition sets its sights on the future of fantastic cinema. Represented among the future masters we also find the decade’s most comical take on hauntings and exorcisms (Extra Ordinary), Jeremy Gardner’s impactful mash-up of relationship drama and creature feature (Something Else), and a well-deserved slot for Daniel Hui’s wildly unpredictable Demons, which is sure to be a conversation starter.
Popping over to the Vortex section, we see Rob Zombie’s 3 from Hell ready to inspire its share of shudders, Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy starring a hipster Elijah Wood, Larry Fessenden’s Depraved, an idiosyncratic Brooklyn-based take on Frankenstein, as well as Brad Michael Elmore’s Bit, which could be a discovery for fantastic film festivals following its Outfest world premiere earlier this summer. All this and more is just the tip of the iceberg.
Midnighters, you ask? /slash has you covered with the efficient jump-scare fest that is Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, the Soska Sisters’ Rabid remake, and a succubus-centered tale of sexual repression (Porno).
Asian cinema is well-represented with the Jun'ichi Okada starring adaptation of popular manga The Fable, action-packed cops-and-robbers gem The Scoundrels, and two Cannes world premieres - Nina Wu and The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil.
None of the above should be seen as an exhaustive list for any of the numerous sections /slash now houses over the course of 11 glorious days. By this point /slash has gotten so big that a single article can no longer contain the vastness of their programming and ambition, which - anything but self-centered - is elegantly phrased in the 2019 festival catalog: “Let us celebrate the public forum we make for each other, the (giant) family we have become, the antidote to that grisly isolation of digital platforms.”
Anyone eager to learn more about /slash 2019 should head on over to the festival’s official website or - better yet! - consider hopping on a plane for a late September visit to beautiful Vienna. In the unlikely event that the city were to disappoint, /slash will surely make it worth your while, as they have been doing for genre aficionados for a decade now.