Sitges King Kong Trailer57th Sitges Film Festival: Audience First Olivia Popp January 2025 Festival Reports Issue 112 As a self-proclaimed “longtime genre film fan”, it felt fortuitous to end up at Spain’s 57th Sitges Film Festival (or in its extended form, the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, running 3–13 October) as my very first genre cinema event. Established in 1968 and now known as the foremost festival of its type, Sitges has screened many now-iconic films that premiered at A-list festivals, including: Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003), and Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), all of which also secured the top prize when they played at Sitges. And so, I entered hoping to find something special there, wholeheartedly ready to embrace works that could very well range from old-timey sci-fi horror retrospectives with terrible special effects to big-budget works by well-respected filmmakers (case in point: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence opened the festival). I had waited for this for so long: a haven for so-called trash, pulp, cult, and oddball paracinema. The short train ride from Barcelona to the beachside town already had me in good spirits – looking out the window, the Mediterranean waters sparkled back at me, a far cry from Berlin’s cloudy blanket that had muddled my head prior – and I had already spotted several Sitges tote bags on the train. My feature film viewership opened with Bodegón con fantasmas (Still Life with Ghosts, Enrique Buleo, 2024) a Spanish costumbrismo dramedy in five chapters of small-town life, mostly ironic in tone but occasionally darkly humorous that very much appealed to the Spanish parts of the crowd at moments that I didn’t quite understand. But more importantly, this screening set the tone for the festival and ultimately acted as a primer: I was most immediately struck by the way audiences reacted, even simply to the film’s opening titles. When the short Sitges trailer (a greyscale 23 seconds of the festival’s iconic silhouetted symbol, King Kong, taking a swipe at passing biplanes off the coast of Sitges) hit the screen, the audience burst into hoots and hollers. In attendance were reactive but never overindulgent audiences that would burst into applause when a particularly well-timed left hook met its intended target, or a protagonist achieved a long-sought objective. At first, I looked around, amused and even perhaps feeling slight second-hand embarrassment at the enthusiasm. But over the course of the festival, this grew to be the joyful status quo. Whereas, at other festivals, one might cheer at the production companies (I’m giving a pointed glance at Toronto), viewers voiced their dedication to and also respect for the festival itself and the filmmakers, complete with boisterous applause whenever the director’s name flashed onscreen, no matter how emergent. Lying squarely between my polar opposite earlier-year experiences of an eerily dead-silent Anora (Sean Baker) screening and a distractingly raucous showing of Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass), this is how I came to really appreciate my first genre film festival. I felt gratified to experience this kind of excitement over each film, as it allowed me to see the best in even the films that disappointed me. Luna However, an interesting dialectic emerged between the audiences and bits that I drew from press reactions. Spanish national press seemed to judge their own country’s filmmakers quite harshly, such as during the press conference for sci-fi space drama Luna (Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas), where I had heard that the director was seemingly crucified for low-budget technicalities. This became apparent as Cortés-Cavanillas sought to proactively justify the film’s creative merit in a conversation I had with him, while I found the film cinematographically vivid despite its obvious financial limitations leading to less-than-realistic space-gravity effects. These perspectives seemed to butt heads in an environment that places high value on entertainment and in zealousness, encapsulating a significant portion of genre film, but certainly not all of it. One of these odd ones out was the French grounded fantasy Par amour (Call of Water, Élise Otzenberger), situated within an oeuvre and stylistic umbrella that often appeals to me. The film’s opening scene plainly takes you emotionally by the throat while set off by sweeping oceanside landscapes not unlike those at Sitges, leading into Otzenberger’s watery world that you almost expect will move into Shape of Water territory, but never does. Between Cécile de France toplining the film as a mother of two boys and its commitment to family drama at the heart of its conflict, it was surprising to see the work world-premiering at Sitges and not elsewhere. The film’s inclusion in the Official Fantastic Competition was also refreshing, as it seemed to embrace magical realism as a part of genre cinema – something that could be argued against by loyalists. Nonetheless, the crowd at the world premiere was considerably smaller than I expected, certainly nowhere near filling the 1380-seater Meliá Sitges auditorium, leading to a quieter experience. The applause for Otzenberger’s name was still present, but mellower, and Renate Reinsve’s name in the opening credits of A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2023) received no applause, to my initial shock. Audiences at Sitges were clearly looking for something else, even if the more “adventurous” ones were turning to more standard festival fare and not the other way around. Call of Water Just as some films were intentionally softer, some films that promised exhilaration fell short, including the Amy Adams-led horror-comedy Nightbitch (Marielle Heller), which just very unfortunately never dares to be anything great beyond its faux-provocative title. The premise, which advertises a story based on Adams’ character’s suspicion that she is slowly turning into a dog, holds such potential of being a deliciously absurd commentary on the theme of motherhood but lands face-first into bland territory. Nightbitch fiercely and repeatedly dangles weirdness in front of the viewer like the boy who cried wolf and continuously fails to deliver, a sort of feminism-for-dummies that reflects on poignant issues without fracturing the tip of the iceberg. Despite tensions skyrocketing through a story that reconfirms my desire to never have children (although the film’s closing has a sweeter outcome), I was left yearning for something considerably more perverse and wicked like the recently-premiered The Assessment (Fleur Fortuné) when it comes to the breadth of so-called “Mommy Issues” cinema. Messy risk-taking can be so much more easily forgiven; when there’s none at all, you’re left asking what the point of the tempting premise was in the first place. Conversely, a film for which I held zero expectations that left me elated was Samurai taimusurippā (A Samurai in Time, Yasuda Jun’ichi), which previously earned the Gold Audience Award for Best Asian Feature at Fantasia Film Festival. Arriving barely in time for the morning screening, I landed on the right side of the front row in the small Escorxador cinema, which I was initially worried would taint the screening experience (instead, a particularly passionate couple’s make-out session in the adjacent seats was the thing that briefly did it in, but here’s to a samurai time-travel flick’s ability to turn folks on before noon). As a film that I initially dreaded would overstay its welcome at a runtime of over two hours, what emerged was a gleeful underdog of a sci-fi time-travel comedy following a samurai who gets propelled forward in time to the present day, eventually finding work as a swordsman-cum-stuntman on jidaigeki period TV shows depicting Japan before the Meiji Restoration. Touching and hilarious in its own way, the film’s pinch of cheesiness can be forgiven, especially as it never borders on cringe material. A Samurai in Time became my surprise find of the festival: it never promises to be anything so deep or thrilling, but it follows through on its fun-factor while also acting as a tribute to the “dying” jidaigeki genre. Through this, it reflects more broadly on what is valued in Japanese media and society in the past and in the present, further offering hope for the future. It even includes a later-film turn that builds on unexpectedly from the script’s earlier narrative elements, which was simply a bonus. A Samurai in Time I had a hard time pinning down my thoughts on two films that had similar characteristics, Locarno Piazza Grande selection Sew Torn (Freddy Macdonald) and Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner), the latter of which eventually won the Sitges’ top audience award. One on hand, they are both narratively and technically quite – if I may venture to say – self-indulgent films, but on the other hand, they still manage to entertain to a certain level, as long as you don’t think too hard about the intentionality. Both works are by American directors whose work seeks to impress through relying heavily on techniques to ‘surprise’ the audience – almost as if reaching for gasps. Sew Torn, described as a “Rube Goldberg” mystery for its deep reliance on its seamstress protagonist’s unbelievable prowess with thread, is a three-part thriller offering different but equally bleak outcomes to three tiny choices à la Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998). Strange Darling is a non-chronological serial killer horror-thriller where shock-value comes mainly from the narrative structure that subverts the trap into which Mollner leads the audience – without it, the film falls apart. I was left questioning the root of these films: each so heavily emphasized a convoluted high concept spectacle but felt otherwise forgettable save for their individual gimmicks. I wondered if this was a trend in more independent U.S. genre cinema and whether the purpose is to stand out rather than carve out different forms of intentionality. I still have no clear answers, but if Sitges has taught me anything, it’s not to dismiss anything at first glance. After a lukewarm reception at Toronto, the commitment to defying expectation from Daniela Forever (Nacho Vigalondo) very pleasantly surprised me, and I was left wondering why a disconnect existed between expectation and reality for so many viewers – the popular discourse around the film led me to believe that Henry Golding’s protagonist would play a much more active, desperate, frenzied, and furious role – including the film’s key still, which has a glowing, halcyon quality to it. After all, he takes part in a lucid dreams trial that allows him to reunite with his late girlfriend (Beatrice Grannò) – one might expect this utopic playground to yield a certain set of outcomes, but the filmmaker’s choices end up surprising. What the film’s marketing leaves as an in-theatre reveal is how the film is told in two distinct ways: the protagonist’s extraordinarily dreary lens on the “real world” is shot on analogue Betamax camcorder, while the dream world is dimensionally expansive, vivid, and crisp. So, as I exited the film, I felt tied up in twisted limbo because Daniela Forever, frankly, is not about yearning or pleasure-seeking at all – it’s about an all-consuming depression. As Vigalondo signed a set of posters after an interview I held with him, he remarked to me that he loved the design. From upper left to bottom right, the poster depicts a casual chronology of the relationship in portrait photos, set on a vibrant purple background, from the blissful pair to Golding looking on in confusion and, eventually, a blank stare as Grannò fades away. Soon, I quickly discovered that the clues for this story were really there from the start, and perhaps it says something about my decreasing eye for detail as nurtured by today’s attention-driven world (or lack of grace for stories that differ from my preconceived notions about them) that I wasn’t observant or patient enough to notice them. Daniela Forever Despite my attempts to be stuck in a time loop, I also found it important to reflect on one of the early phenomena I witnessed at Sitges to gain more insight into the festival’s true basis. Upon arriving at the train station, one of my first acts was to take a walk through the festival area, spread across the town’s touristic side and along the sunny beach. I saw a large number of young audiences around town, including students of around secondary school age, proudly wearing their accreditation lanyards and eagerly chatting about the next films they were going to watch. With the “fanshops” decked out along the water, the immediate instinct I had was that Sitges appeared to be the lovechild of a comic book convention and a film festival. Merch stands lining the beachfront that catered to the nerd and geek culture segment of genre film: posters and shirts depicting classic horror films, action figures and character statuettes, cheeky buttons and pins, and the like. But as someone who first self-indoctrinated into the cinematic space by consuming copious amounts of nerd film (and even what some filmmakers might disdainfully call, as Martin Scorsese infamously did in 2019, “not cinema”),1 this was never a bad sign, even if the consumeristic tendencies in these spaces can feel odd. I immediately found the attraction to these items recognisable and familiar, even if I no longer identified strongly with the desire to collect. To me, it showed that the festival has within its grasp a community whose love for genre cinema of different types has them returning year after year – and a love that might just very well be symbolised by a piece of tabletop decor. Sitges Film Festival 3 – 13 October 2024 https://sitgesfilmfestival.com Endnotes Catherine Shoard, “Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies are ‘not cinema’”, The Guardian, 4 October 2019. ↩