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When requested what movies greatest signify the polar extremes of programming at this yr’s Calgary Underground Movie Pageant, co-founder and head-programmer Brenda Lieberman factors to Ghostlight, Alex Thompson
and Kelly O’Sullivan’s tender American dramedy about household, grief and neighborhood theatre, and Canadian director Chris Nash’s slow-burning, visceral horror-slasher movie In A Violent Nature.
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Presumably, Lieberman noticed them at this yr’s Sundance Movie Pageant in Utah, the place each acquired important buzz.
“When it comes to emotion, it was Ghostlight,” says Lieberman. “I just about cried for that complete film, it’s so emotionally heavy. It’s so good and it actually brings you into this household and this world. I struggled having to look at something after that one which day at Sundance.”
In A Violent Nature, whereas additionally getting good opinions, is a really totally different movie, a intelligent POV-shift on the cabin-in-the-woods horror flick that doesn’t maintain again on the gore.
“It’s actually graphic horror,” Lieberman says. “But it surely’s a very quiet, slow-paced slasher movie that’s completed in a very totally different and distinctive method.”
The competition introduced the lineup for its twenty first version on Wednesday. introducing dozens of titles that cowl wildly totally different themes, genres and subgenres in darkish, quirky, provocative or simply plain goofy methods. The competition, which can display screen picks on the Globe Cinema from April 18 to twenty-eight, may also characteristic a number of particular occasions. That features the return of Baltimore cult filmmaker John Waters, who will supply his spoken-word present Satan’s Advocate on April 24 on the Globe after which introduce his 1994 movie Serial Mother starring Kathleen Turner. Waters final attended CUFF in 2012.
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“We observed he was on tour earlier than so we thought this was the right technique to deliver him again,” says Lieberman. “It’s an entire new present we haven’t proven earlier than and tying it into the competition was the right technique to match him again into our programming and it appeared it was a pleasant match with the thirtieth anniversary of Serial Mother.”
On April 17, in the future earlier than the competition formally opens, CUFF will have fun Nationwide Canadian Movie Day with a screening of Jim Makichuk’s 1981 thriller Ghostkeeper. The movie was shot in Lake Louise and Banff and was the one Alberta title filmed below the Canadian tax shelter program of the Eighties, which additionally allowed movies similar to Louis Malle’s Atlantic Metropolis with Burt Lancaster, Daryl Duke’s The Silent Associate with Elliott Gould, Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs with Invoice Murray, Peter Medak’s The Changeling with George C. Scott and Bob Clark’s Porky’s.
The competition will open April 18 with the Canadian premiere of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Noticed the TV Glow, which was additionally a provocative hit at Sundance. Schoenbrun is a non-binary filmmaker whose earlier film, We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful, was an acclaimed coming-of-age horror movie. I Noticed the TV Glow can be a psychological horror movie that centres on two teenagers obsessive about a tv present.
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“It actually speaks to at this time’s tradition of youth and fandom and what’s going on with media and the world of tv,” says Lieberman. “We needed one thing that was extremely anticipated but in addition speaks to a few of the area of interest programming we’re doing on the competition.”
Whereas CUFF holds a separate competition annually in November for documentary movies, this lineup consists of some non-fiction movies, together with the Canadian premiere of Andrew Reich’s Born Harmless: The Redd Kross Story in regards to the seminal punk-college rock band from California that fashioned in 1978 when the members had been nonetheless pre-teens; John Edward Makens’s Artwork & Life: The Story of Jim Phillips, in regards to the pioneering skateboard-punk artist; John MacLaverty’s self-explanatory Loch Ness: They Created a Monster; Alex Braverman’s Thank You Very A lot, which is about comic/efficiency artist Andy Kaufman, and Eric Weinrib and Nate Pommer’s Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello story, about Ukrainian band chief Eugene Hütz’s profession.
Different movies embody Francis Gallupi’s The Final Cease in Yuma Nation, a Tarantino-esque neo-western heist thriller. Gallupi and star Jim Cummings are anticipated to attend the competition.
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“It’s such a crowd-pleasing movie,” Lieberman says. “It has a humour that each one of us fell in love with.”
There can be a two-film retrospective of Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, together with 1997’s trippy sci-fi/horror cult traditional Dice and his 2003 surreal comedy Nothing. Andrew Miller and David Hewlett, who starred in each, can be attending.
Calgary expat Caden Douglas may also be available to introduce the Canadian premiere of Mom Father Sister Brother Frank, a dark-comedy horror flick a few dysfunctional household starring the Reality of Life’s Mindy Cohn of all folks. Douglas was born and raised in Calgary however presently lives in Los Angeles.
Humane is the dystopian thriller debut from second-generation filmmaker Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of icon David Cronenberg, and stars Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Enrico Colantoni and Peter Gallagher.
“On the finish of the day, we’re exhibiting movies which might be artistic and really audience-driven,” Lieberman says. “Movies that we really feel are higher skilled within the cinematic setting with everyone. Whereas a few of them may be launched shortly afterward, it’s the concept we’re curating content material that they wouldn’t essentially be aware of in any other case or know the place to seek out and be capable of expertise it collectively.”
The Calgary Underground Movie Pageant runs from April 18 to twenty-eight on the Globe Cinema. Go to calgaryundergroundfilm.org for a full lineup and showtimes.
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