It is a Switzerland kind of day here at ScreenAnarchy. The Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival announced their full program for this year's edition. There are some terrific films in their lineup so we'd thought we'd do the festival a solid and highlight those for our readers in the area.
Peter Strickland's Flux Gourmet will open the film program this year and Carter Smith's Swallowed has been chosen to close out the five day event. In between festival attendees will also have the chance to see All Jacked Up And Full of Worms, Jethica and Unicorn Wars.
The portion of the announcement pertaining to film follows. You will find links to our coverage of the films mentioned below that. More information about the complete program at Lausanne Underground at their website.
LUFF UNVEILS ITS FULL 2022 PROGRAMMEAesthetics of excess, vocal saturations and collective telepathy will be on the agenda of the 21st edition!The Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival unveils the full programme of its 21st edition taking place from October 19 to 23, 2022. With the Casino de Montbenon as its central venue, the festival also invites its audience to make their way through the various partner locations in Lausanne where screenings, sound performances, workshops, book launches, and other exhibitions will come to life. Just like the artists it highlights, LUFF constantly reinvents its contours and its content by showing works that are at the intersection and edges of genres and practices. It is up to visitors to create their own pathway, as meandering as it might appear, between the film programmes showing muddy treasures unearthed from the high-spheres of underground cinema and the concert evenings giving voice to inaudible noises and unspeakable words. In the midst of this affirmed incoherence, the festival hopes to bring out once again the unique effervescence of LUFF.During the five days of festivities, the international competitions will unveil a total of 51 feature and short films grouped into 5 categories. The careers of leading figures in independent cinema will be highlighted in 6 retrospectives and thematic cartes blanches. 5 documentary features and 1 world premiere special screening will complete this rich filmic offering. As for music, the Casino’s Salle des Fêtes will host no less than 22 performances and, on the outdoor space, 8 interdisciplinary projects will be presented with free admission as part of OFF.FILMCulino-gastric performances are expected to open this edition with Flux Gourmet a feature film by Peter Strickland, starring actor Asa Butterfield (Sex Education). The screening will be followed by the World premiere of Never Gate by Geneva-based directors Elena Montesinos and JD Schneider.The feature film competition will open with the European premiere of the very strange All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, which unfolds like a long, grimy, hallucinatory nightmare. Two International premieres will be presented: Cuddly Toys, the committed mondo by young director Kansas Bowlings about the dangers of being a young woman in the United States, and Breathing Happy, which deals with the theme of addiction, or rather sobriety, at Christmas time and with a great dose of sensitivity. Unfolding against a dramatic satire background, Jethica, by American director Pete Ohs, will make its Swiss premiere. Finally, Unicorn Wars, a nasty French-Spanish cartoon, will twist the codes of animation for a somewhat brutal turnaround. Treasures of all kinds will follow one another in the short film competition and its four categories: animation, documentary, fiction and experimental.This year's documentary feature section creates links between the various artists and projects at LUFF. French filmmakers Nicolas Drolc and Guillaume Marietta will unveil, in International premiere, La Grande Triple Alliance Internationale de l'Est, a film about the eponymous movement/non-movement in which the band Sida was involved. The latter will make its return on stage for the last night of the festival. Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes is a fascinating portrait of the artist who created the theme music for the Dr. Who series. This biopic’s soundtrack was incidentally created by artist Cosi Fanni Tutti, who will be featured in Other, Like Me on the journey of industrial music pioneers COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. The odd one out of this very musical selection, Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street recounts the period when Mark Patton was the target of homophobic attacks following his role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. The actor has since made his return to the big screen with a performance in Carter Smith's Swallowed, which will close this 21st edition.As every year, LUFF highlights the career of key figures in film productions on the fringes with retrospectives and cartes blanches. A central theme of this edition, Camp and its queer and grotesque dimensions will be presented in "Bad Taste is Good Taste: Underground Camp Melodrama". A component found in the aesthetics of Stephen Sayadian’s films, author of Café Flesh. Some of his photographic work will also be exhibited at La Rasude during the festival. The filmmaker Roberta Findlay will come to Switzerland for the first time to show us her erotic and horrific works. As for the cinerama "Satirical & Political: A short film selection", it will give carte blanche to the resolute anarchist and sixty-eighter at heart, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou. Finally, the retrospective of American director Travis Wilkerson’s activist documentaries will make a political and social shift into the cineramas programmes.