2023 BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL: PREVIEW

The 23nd annual Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF) returns to Harvard Square’s arthouse hub The Brattle Theatre with five days of vanguard cinemania from March 22-26. This year’s lineup is stacked with fearsome folk horror, mendacious miscreants, godless god-complexes, eco-chillers, sensational sci-fi, and all manner of midnight madness.

BUFF will host the World Premiere of the Massachusetts-based horror thriller The Unheard (pictured, below) for a homecoming heroes’ welcome on Opening Night. Starring Lachlan Watson, director Jeffrey A. Brown’s haunting feature follows a deaf young woman ensconced in a signal-to-noise mystery of dueling truths and realities. Brown (The Beach House, 2019) and local screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rassmussen (Crawl, 2019) will attend a post-screening Q&A.

Fresh off its world premiere at Sundance, Eddie Alcazar’s retro-sci-fi, singularly WTF masterpiece Divinity (pictured, top) will have its U.S. East Coast premiere at BUFF. Starring Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Bella Thorne, and produced by Steven Soderbergh, this deranged, drug-addled, dystopian vision, where beauty and grotesquery abound, is 100% uncompromising underground cinema.

Also fresh from a SXSW debut is writer/director Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Teen science genius Vicaria (The Equalizer’s Laya DeLeon Hayes) plays god when she embarks on a quest to find the cure for death; a disease, she theorizes, versus an inevitability. Breathing new life into Frankenstein’s monster, Story’s electric feature debut challenges conceptions of mortality and monstrosity through a Black lens.

BUFF will present a double-dose of international folk horror with both Tereza Nvotová’s Nightsiren (pictured, below), which examines the chokehold grip of toxic patriarchal structures on a remote Slovakian village, and mark Jenkin’s sumptuous cinematic stunner Enys Men, which follows the sole inhabitant of a craggy Cornish island’s descent into madness. 

Other BUFF highlights include Daniel Goldhaber’s high-stakes, heist-style thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the story of young environmental activists and their mission to sabotage a Texas pipeline; Quentin Dupieux’s French dark comedy/quasi-horror superhero sendup Smoking Causes Coughing; Kristoffer Borgli’s Scandinavian unromantic comedy Sick of Myself, which takes toxic relationships to the next level..

Off-kilter factual filmmaking is repped by Kiwi journalist David Farrier’s Mister Organ, a chronicle of his encounters with multi-hyphenate scammer Michael Organ, an extortionary, mercenary antique shop parking lot enforcer with a wild history of false identities and insane lawsuits, and Ryan Worsley’s latest Stand By for Failure: A Documentary About Negativland a history of the culture jamming, plunderphonic prophets.

BUFF’s commitment to the beautifully weird and otherworldly continues with Berlin-based visual artist Ann Oren’s sensuous debut Piaffe, which follows the story of Eva (The Untamed’s Simone Bucio), an introvert who discovers the joys of foreplay and horseplay when she starts growing a tail. Equally allegorical and hypnotizing is Ryan Stevens Harris’ gorgeously photographed Moon Garden, which follows a comatose child on a dark Gilliamesque odyssey back to consciousness. 

BUFF’s 2023 program teems with the topical themes of families in crisis, most notably the inclusion of Kirby McClure’s atmospheric debut Spaghetti Junction (pictured, right), a deft blend of sci-fi, fantasy, and social realism in a tale of a Southern family grappling with life after a devastating loss. 

To close out the festival, BUFF will screen Belgian directing duo Adil & Bilall’s personal and challenging feature, Rebel. Known for the recently-shelved Batgirl production, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s poignant, and bold melange of action, drama, and musical centres around a Muslim family caught in the crosshairs of jihadist radicalism. Having premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the film earned waves of critical support; Cineuropa called it a, “fascinating work [that] proves why it's essential for cinema to have a diverse range of voices,” while Slashfilm said the film is, “An emotional gut punch.”

THE BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVALOfficial Program details and ticketing information can be found here.