PREVIEW: 2021 FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA

The 2021 Fantastic Film Festival Australia (FFFA) promises a second round of extraordinary real-life horror stories, paradigm-shifting film realities and surrealistic studies of society’s fringe-dwellers inhabiting the 21-film strong roster. The new line-up of the world’s most daring works from filmmakers with innovative and unique perspectives will screen from April 16 to May 1, exclusively to the Lido Cinemas in Hawthorn, Victoria and the Ritz Cinema, Randwick in New South Wales.

“Genre cinema has an unmatched ability to conjure up a truth that is raw and gets under our skin,” said Fantastic Film Festival Artistic Director Hudson Sowada, via press release. “Having leaped into 2021 with a sense of hope, we should look to those on the fringes to take risks and help us question reality.” 

Hot off a Sundance premiere is the Opening Night film, Prisoners of the Ghostland, the some-would-say inevitable pairing of two cinematic renegades - Japanese auteur Sion Sono, cult-thespian Nicolas Cage (pictured, right), with enigmatic starlet Sofia Boutella (The Mummy; Climax) also in the mix. This giddy ‘acid-Western’, set in a fantastical fictional city that is half Westworld/half Tokyo Disney, follows Cage’s shotgun-toting outlaw on a rescue mission through a post-apocalyptic world.

Sono is one of several Asian genre filmmakers being celebrated with a program placement in the FFFA 2021 line-up. Korean writer-director Kim Yon-hoon’s neo-noir Beasts Clawing at Straws follows a group of cash-strapped people and a bag full of money, and Get the Hell Out (pictured, top) is a manic zombie movie about braindead politics from Taiwanese auteur I-Fan Wang.

Closing the Festival is the shocking and boundary-pushing Mother Schmuckers, from directors Lenny and Harpo Guit. Set on the lawless streets of late-night Brussels, this odyssey of the absurd conveys the existential angst of two dim-witted brothers whose quest to find their mother’s beloved dog leads them into a reality like no other.

Matters of the heart are explored in three deeply unconventional love stories. In Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat, a gambler becomes obsessed with his favourite cam girl (Uncut Gems’ Julia Fox; pictured, right), blurring the line between customer and client; a reclusive and deeply repressed man hatches the perfect plan to win the heart of his new tenant in Parish Malfitano’s Aussie-noir indie, Bloodshot Heart; and, the very real condition objectophilia is explored in Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo, the fable-like story of an amusement park worker (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant) entering an erotic relationship with a merry-go-round.

Non-fiction films exploring the more fantastic elements of our world are also premiering at FFFA. The latest from the complex creativity of director Rodney Ascher (Room 237; The Nightmare) is A Glitch in the Matrix, a dissection of the 21st century’s greatest existential fear - are we living in a simulation?. And Miles Hargrove’s Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped Abroad chronicles the gruelling process of rescuing his father from a Colombian drug cartel holding him ransom for six million dollars.

A highlight of the festival will be a rare screening of Elem Klimov’s gruelling 1985 Russian war epic Come and See, presented as a 2K digital restoration. A crushing, ruthless depiction of the potential of human evil, Come and See (pictured, right) is an anti-war film reimagining the events of 1943, when the Nazis entered Belarus, as experienced through the eyes of a naïve boy. 

Special festival events including a carefully curated program of 16mm films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s in titled Analogue Orgy (Lido Cinemas only) and a staging of Dungeons & Dragons, in which fans can craft their own fantastic adventure with the help of Sydney and Melbourne’s most experienced Dungeon Masters.

FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA will run Friday, 16 April – Saturday, 1 May at the   Lido Cinemas, Hawthorn and Friday, 16 April – Friday, 30 April at the Ritz Cinema, Randwick. Ticket and session details can be found at the event’s Official Website.