International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia
Sant Honorat, 32-34. 08870 Sitges, Barcelona
From 7 to October 17 from 2021
The newest from Ben Wheatley, Ana Lily Amirpour, Álex de la Iglesia, Julia Ducournau, Neill Blomkamp, Paco Plaza or David Lowery, will be at the Festival
The 54th edition of the Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia began and the streets are already adorned to serve as a showcase for 11 days of the most risky, innovative and transgressive cinema of the moment. From October 7 to 17, the howls of fans of the fantastic genre will resound through a line up with 169 titles that collect the latest and most anticipated trends in a cinema that is taking the forefront of the cinephile chronicle more than ever, taking important awards in main festivals. An obvious example of this is Julia Ducournau's Titane, Palme d'Or at Cannes 2021, which will be part of the Official Fantastic Specials Section along with the highly anticipated Last Night in Soho by Edgar Wright or the indescribable duo between Nicolas Cage and director Sion Sono in Prisoners of the Ghostland.
Earwig will also be in Sitges, special prize of the jury at the San Sebastián 2021 festival, accompanied by its director, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, who will receive the Career Prize awarded by the Méliès International Festivals Federation (MIFF). A recognition that is added to that of the directors Mamoru Hosoda, who will present his latest animation work Belle in competition, and Carlos Saura, distinguished along with the actress Belén Rueda with the Grand Honorary Award of this 54th edition. This year's Màquina del Temps awards will go to director Neill Blomkamp, who presents his latest Demonic in the Official Selection, actress Alice Krige, star of She Will, also in competition, and Nick Antosca, special guest at the new Sitges showrunners Lab Pitchbox and screenwriter for Antlers, a Guillermo del Toro production that can be seen at the festival. The list of winners for this edition is completed by the composer Roque Baños, awarded the María Honorary Award, and the actor Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, who will receive the Nosferatu Prize awarded by the Brigadoon section.
Ana Lily Amirpour will return to Sitges seven years after her debut with A Girl Comes Home Alone at Night to present the opening title of this 54th edition, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, in a time of clear transformation for the genre where the presence of the female gaze is increasingly relevant. A good example of this are some titles present in various sections of the festival such as Censor, the debut of the Welsh Prano Bailey-Bond, the British Silent Night, a black comedy directed by Camille Griffin, Here Before, a debut by Stacey Gregg, or Bloodthirsty, the The second film by Canadian Amelia Moses to be seen in Noves Visions, which explores the main theme of this year's leitmotif about the werewolf and the beast within. For its part, the medieval epic fantasy of The Green Knight, a film directed by David Lowery, which already captivated the festival audience with the poetic A Ghost Story in 2017, will be in charge of closing Sitges 2021.
The new installment of the Halloween saga recovered by David Gordon Green in Halloween Kills, nor the new works of friends of the festival such as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, could not be absent from this year's programming, which will present in the Official Section The Deep House, a Groundbreaking supernatural underwater horror story. Another Sitges regular, Ben Wheatley, also returns with his new proposal in In the Earth, shot in the middle of the Covid pandemic, or Tommy Wirkola, director of Nazi Zombies and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, who brings his new film to Sitges, The Trip (I Onde Dager), a thriller loaded with dark humor starring Noomi Rapace. Titles that caused a sensation at the Cannes 2021 festival, such as the Norwegian film The Innocents, the Icelandic film Lamb, or terrifying and especially violent Asian proposals such as those that we will find in The Medium and The Sadness, among some of the most shocking films.
The latest Spanish productions will also be presented in Sitges as a sample of the good state of the most current state fantasy. The debut operas by Catalan David Casademunt in El páramo and Alberto Evangelio in Visitante, the horror epic Y todos arderán, the Galician film Jacinto, a terrifying road-movie in a van in La pasajera, the disturbing science fiction of Tres, la alliance between Carlos Vermut and Paco Plaza to give life to La abuela, the world premiere of Álex de la Iglesia's Veneciafrenia, and the premiere of the four stories of Stories to not sleep that brings together some of the most important filmmakers on the recent Spanish scene like Rodrigo Cortés, Paula Ortiz, Paco Plaza and Rodrigo Sorogoyen.
The festival will continue to discover unpublished films to the public such as The Amusement Park (1973) by the legendary George A. Romero in the Seven Chances section in collaboration with the Catalan Association of Film Critics and Writing (ACCEC), recovering fantastic treasures in Sitges Classics within the framework of the retrospective of The Inner Beast, such as The Forest of the Wolf (1970) by Pedro Olea and The Return of the Wolf Man (1981) by Paul Naschy, two essential films in the history of our cinema, and offering Free alternative proposals in the Brigadoon section with titles such as the Welcome to Hell premiere or the documentary Fulci Talks - Uncut Conversation with Lucio Fulci, by Antonietta De Lillo.
One more year, Auditorio, Retiro, Prado, Tramuntana and Brigadoon will be key spaces of the festival and witnesses of the best annual harvest of the latest in feature lengths, shorts, documentaries and fantastic series. A program that is completed with a renewed agenda of parallel activities, industry conferences, exhibitions, meeting spaces for fans, presentations and official publications.
Sitges Industry
The professional section of the Festival will host more than 30 activities including round tables, presentations of projects in development, workshops, masterclass sessions and meetings in order to offer current content from the audiovisual sector and fantastic cinema to professionals in the sector.
In this edition, Sitges Industry continues with a hybrid format, combining online and face-to-face activities in order to promote contact between professionals from the international sector. One more year we have the virtual platform Sitges Industry - Catalan Films Online, thanks to the support of Catalan Films (Catalan Institute of Cultural Companies, ICEC), from where meetings can be arranged, consult the guide of the professionals who participate in the Festival and access all the content of the section.
For the seventh consecutive year, the Festival organizes, together with the Filmarkethub platform, the Sitges Pitchbox, the international pitching event focused on horror, science fiction or fantasy projects in development. This new edition will be held in a hybrid way and will be focused on both international feature films and European series in development phase. In total, seven feature films and five series have been selected. Those responsible for these projects will have the opportunity to make a seven-minute pitch and then have one-to-one meetings with the participating companies. Additionally, four cash prizes will be distributed for development expenses. Participating companies include: XYZ Films, Wild Bunch, Exile Contento Studio, Globalgate Entertainment, Red Arrow Studios, The Mediapro Studio, Showrunner Films, and more.
Mick Garris will be the special guest of Sitges Pitchbox 2021, the director, screenwriter, producer and writer, father of Masters of Horror or Critters 2 among others, will be the godfather of honor this year.
As the main novelty, this edition of Sitges Pitchbox will be complemented with the Showrunners LAB, an introductory seminar and advice on the figure of the showrunner, a key piece in series productions, through the presentation and analysis of three models: the North American, the Scandinavian and Spanish.
The initiative, which has the support and co-organization of Europa Creativa Desk - MEDIA Catalonia, invites the five series projects selected in the Sitges Pitchbox call to participate in this laboratory, which will have the collaboration of an outstanding showrunner representative of each of the models. The three participating showrunners will be Nick Antosca, Teresa Fernández-Valdés and Jannik Tai Mosholt. The guest showrunners in the program will offer one-to-one consultancy to the five projects and will carry out a masterclass exposing the main characteristics of their model, as well as a study-case based on their trajectory.
Female filmmakers and industry
WomanInFan, the program for the visibility and incorporation of creative women in fantastic cinematography, will kick off with a round table where the three scholarship recipients of this year, Anna Moragriega, Irene Moray and Laura Ferrés, will participate, along with some representatives closely linked to the fantastic and horror audiovisual sector such as Belén Rueda, Prano Bailey-Bond, Helen Jones or Ana Lily Amirpour. During the festival, the selected ones will delve into the fantasy genre through masterclasses, round tables, films and mentoring sessions with relevant personalities within the genre such as the filmmakers Luna, Paco Plaza or the producer Nadine Rothschild. The program is possible thanks to the collaboration of Dama Autor, Vertix i Acció Cinema.
Cinema and Literature
The initiative of the Festival that seeks to bring literature and fantasy cinema closer together, Sitges Taboo'ks, will present in its 5th edition an informative day on the different aspects of market trends with round tables and talks by experts from various branches of the sector. In addition, the director, screenwriter and producer Pedro Olea will offer us a study-case where he will explain his experience in adapting the novel El bosque de Ancines, by Carlos Martínez-Barbeito, which served as the basis for making El bosque del lobo.
In the afternoon, Taboo'ks will have a practical workshop where editors, agents and representatives of literary rights will be able to learn the keys to an audiovisual dossier and the main evaluation criteria in commissions. Participants will be able to present a project and a selection will be made of the three most outstanding ones to expose its viability.
Innovation and fantasy genre
The Sitges Cocoon section will present talks on new technologies applied to cinematography. We highlight the Blockchain Fairy Tales live storytelling event, an immersive storytelling experience designed by the Columbia University DSL Innovation Center, which has carried out installations mixing immersive cinema and technological innovation at Sundance, Tribeca and IDFA ( Amsterdam).
What kind of horror does the European public like the most? This will be one of the answers that the analyst, Niels Alberg will get from Publikum, a software based on artificial intelligence combined with applied anthropology in film production. In addition, we will have two round tables on video games and we will talk about how to revolutionize the entertainment industry with Serialify and Film.io.
Sitges Industry also hosts several meetings, including one with the winner of this edition, the animation master Mamoru Hosoda, who will receive the public and accredited in a special session where he will talk about his career and creations; and the masterclass by costume designer Alberto Valcárcel, who will talk about how to design for fantastic productions.
The Industry Hub section will host various events in collaboration with the main audiovisual entities in the country. Among others, in this edition we will have the entity PROA (Federated Audiovisual Producers) that organizes a conference with working groups of producers with sales agents. The Catalunya Film Commission offers us the presentation of the Guide for the incorporation of sustainability criteria in filming and filming. And there will also be Producers Meet Producers, the annual meeting between established producers and new production companies, organized by PAC and the Sitges City Council. We will talk about the staging of terror and the school of terror in Catalonia with the AMMAC partners and we will analyze the script for Stories to not sleep with Paco Plaza, Alberto Marini and Rodrigo Cortés, some of its directors and screenwriters.
One more year, the Coming Soon section will also take place, which this year will be virtual and face-to-face with a total of 11 national and Latin American projects of imminent production.
Parallel activities
Sitges 2021 expands the proposal for parallel activities with the definition of a new meeting point, the King Kong Area, a space for continuous travel where leisure activities take place, including the delicious Foodtàstic Area on Avenida de Balmins, which offers meat-eating options , vegetarians and vegans, the Meeting King Kong Area, a relaxed chill out environment with music, radio, podcast, performing arts and photocalls, the Fanshop Area, where we will find official merchandising of the Festival and related to cinema, and the Mercat Vell area , where a series of cinephile workshops dedicated to the youngest are organized as part of the Fantastic Kids or the Fantastic Street Art contest exhibition that will take place on Saturday, October 9 in Port d'Aiguadolç. These initiatives are completed by the session of free fresh short films that will take place in Plaza Cataluña (Sitges) on Friday, October 8 at 20:30 p.m., the contest of Find the beast with the collaboration of businesses in Sitges and the proposal of the Fantàstic Zombie Experience with makeup, photocalls, gastronomy and dance, which replaces the classic Zombie Walk, which will have to wait another year due to capacity restrictions.
This year the space set up by the FNAC tent returns where a series of book presentations and autograph signings of authors such as Fabián Plaza, winner of the XVI Minotauro Prize for Cooler than War, will be held, the presentation of the book El almanaque del video. Oral history of the video store era by Xavier Sánchez Pons, Critters, by Octavio López and the Applehead publishing house or Scream Queer by Javier Parra.
For more information on side events, see sitgesfilmfestival.live/.
Official book
The beast within. Hydes, lycanthropes and other therianthropic figures in the audiovisual imaginary, coordinated by Ángel Sala and Jordi Sánchez-Navarro and with texts by Lluís Rueda, Violeta Kovacsics, Marta Torres, Diego López and Mike Hostench. A look at the cinematographic treatment of the beast that inhabits the interior of the human being that is nothing more than an incarnation of what scares us the most about ourselves.
Three Pieces for the Assassin, by Pacus González Centeno, a book that analyzes the relationship between jazz, rock and electronics with criminal and horror films in the second half of the XNUMXth century.
Exhibitions
-The return of Waldemar Daninsky. Place: Estudi Vidal (C / d'en Bosch 6)
- Werewolf Comix: Tribute to the werewolf. Place: Exit of the Auditorium (only for spectators)
- Drawings made by children from Sitges schools with themes centered on the Festival. Place: Mercat Vell (Town Hall Square, 11)
- artAmore Sitges, “Fantastic” Exhibitions. Place: C / Parelladas, 57
- Traveling exhibition Women who are scary. Place: Libraries of Sitges.
Queer Kong 2021
The Stop Sida organization in collaboration with the Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia celebrates for the third year the recognition of LGTBIQ + diversity with the Queer Kong award, which rewards films programmed at the festival that promote speeches and content included in three categories: Contribution to sexual health LGTBIQ +, Visibility and Integration LGTBIQ + and Representation LGTBIQ + in the industry. The Queer Kong 2021 jury is made up of: Marc Sala, journalist and host of RTVE, Miriam Martínez Hierro, executive producer of Presa 13 Films, Jordi Izquierdo Berbel, producer and director of Cinemoteka Radio RSK FM, Elisa Martínez Parra, member of the Colors Sitges Link association, Miquel Claudì-López, Queer Kong producer, audiovisual producer and Stop Sida volunteer.
XVII Jury Carnet Jove de Sitges
The Catalan Youth Agency through its “Connect” program of the Carnet Jove and the management team of Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, has selected for another year 5 young people who will be part of the XVII Carnet Jove de Sitges Jury, an official jury of the Festival that will award the Carnet Jove Jury Award for the best film in the Official Fantastic Section, the Anima't Award for the Best Animated Feature and the Anima't Award for the Best Animated Short. The objective of this collaboration is to professionalize film criticism, giving the opportunity to five young people interested in the world of cinema to be part of one of the official juries of the Sitges Festival. The selected jury for this year are Charas Vega, Clàudia Guillen, Gerard Jaurena, Meritxell Blanco and Sara Vega.
SITGES 2021 - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia
54th edition | www.sitgesfilmfestival.com
Address: Sant Honorat, 32 - 34 | 08870 Sitges (Barcelona)
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Telephone: + 34 93 894 99 90
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The Cinecritic.biz Team