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Cinematek
PEEPING TOM
Carl Boehm plays a serial-killing photographer who films his victims' dying moments in this classic psychothriller. A groundbreaking study of voyeurism and, by extension, cinema itself, it's given an extra twist by the film's director, Michael Powell, appearing in flashbacks as the killer's cruel father.
FACES OF DEATH
Nauseating but undeniably compelling collection of (mostly) authentic footage of people or animals dying, often in grisly ways. This compilation video, once considered a rite-of-passage for teenage gorehounds, was such a scandalous success that it spawned no less than seven sequels and a raft of copycats.
AFTERSCHOOL
Three years before "We Need to Talk About Kevin", Ezra Miller plays Rob, another alienated schoolkid, who relates to the world only via internet clips. One day he accidentally films the deaths of two students... Writer-director Antonio Campos puts us inside Rob's head, and it's not a comfortable place to be.
MONDO CANE
First and best of the series of "exotic" Mondo shockumentaries that infiltrated cinemas in the 60s, this also provided the template for the notorious "Faces of Death" films and similar compilations of footage of unstaged murders or suicides, depraved rituals, cruelty to animals and other brutish behaviour.
HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER
The banality of murderers has rarely been captured as uncompromisingly as in McNaughton's grim but remarkable directing debut. Henry is seemingly incapable of popping out for a beer without killing a couple of people. In the film's most harrowing scene, he and a kill-buddy watch their own DIY snuff video.
C'EST ARRIVE PRES DE CHEZ VOUS
A film crew is morally compromised as it records the crimes of a serial killer (the great Benoît Poelvoorde in his breakout performance) in this trailblazing Belgian mockumentary. The low budget is turned to advantage in a grisly dark comedy that raises ethical questions about violence and responsibility.
LA MORT EN DIRECT
Romy Schneider plays a terminally ill "computer novelist" who reneges on an agreement to have her final days filmed for a reality TV show, unaware that her new friend (Harvey Keitel) is filming her with a camera embedded in his eyes. Tavernier's thoughtful sci-fi, filmed in Glasgow, is eerily prescient.
WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP
The director of "Man on Wire" made his debut with this docudrama based on Michael Lesy's book. Over black and white recreations, Ian Holm narrates a morbid litany of murder, suicide and insanity from late 19th century records of Black River Falls, a town so ill-starred it makes Twin Peaks seem almost normal.
NEKROMANTIK
Buttgereit's taboo-busting feature-length debut, shot on Super8, was hailed by John Waters as "the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs." Rob and his girlfriend Betty form a ménage-à-trois with a rotting corpse, but when Rob gets fired from his job, Betty leaves him – and takes the corpse with her.
NEKROMANTIK
Buttgereit's taboo-busting feature-length debut, shot on Super8, was hailed by John Waters as "the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs." Rob and his girlfriend Betty form a ménage-à-trois with a rotting corpse, but when Rob gets fired from his job, Betty leaves him – and takes the corpse with her.
STRANGE DAYS
Ralph Fiennes plays weaselly ex-cop Lenny Nero, a dealer in illegal devices enabling users to plug directly into the emotions of suicides, rapists and murderers. Kathryn Bigelow's dystopic sci-fi thriller, set in LA in 1999, packs some brilliant action sequences; Angela Bassett provides splendid back-up.
THE WILD EYE
Cavara confronts the legacy of "Mondo Cane", which he co-directed, with this quasi-autobiographical fiction about a Mondo filmmaker who blurs the boundary between staged and natural death to get better footage. This insider peek at the Mondo phenomenon is a rare classic, screened in a restored version.
THE WAY TO EDEN
Jörg Buttgereit suggested this clear-eyed, philosophical documentary about the chief pathologist in a morgue on the outskirts of Budapest. At home, he leads a regular life with his family; at work, he dissects and eviscerates cadavers, peels back faces and cracks open craniums – all shown in non-sensationalist but unflinching detail.
DES MORTS
Three Belgian filmmakers spent two years filming death rituals, autopsies and mourning customs in various cultures around the world (including Nepal, Japan, Mexico and the USA) for this cinematic montage of "memento mori". The result is a respectful, detached anthropological study with some gruesome images.
HARDCORE
George C. Scott gives a powerhouse performance as a straitlaced Midwest businessman who plunges into California's sleazy porn subculture in a desperate quest to find his missing daughter. Paul Schrader wrote and directed this descent into a netherworld where the line between S&M and snuff is dangerously thin.
SHOCKING ASIA
This German Mondo film, a big hit in its day, sets out to show how bizarre and sick-making Asian traditions can be with its xenophobic commentary on Japanese S&M clubs and Indian cremation. Among other delights on offer are extreme piercings, sex-change surgery, and the slaughter of animals.
[REC]
A TV reporter and her cameraman tag along with a firefighting crew and find themselves trapped in a Barcelona apartment building where residents are succumbing to a rabies-like virus. This rollercoaster of nerve-shredding tension and jump scares is one of the best entries in the "found footage" subgenre.
MONDO CANE
First and best of the series of "exotic" Mondo shockumentaries that infiltrated cinemas in the 60s, this also provided the template for the notorious "Faces of Death" films and similar compilations of footage of unstaged murders or suicides, depraved rituals, cruelty to animals and other brutish behaviour.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
Three students go into the woods to make a documentary about a local legend, and vanish. The only clue to their fates lies in the spooky footage they left behind. This semi-improvised low-budget chiller wasn't the first "found footage" film, but canny internet marketing turned it into a media sensation.
Cinema Nova
HIGH LIFE
Claire Denis' first English language film is a stimulating mix of sex, violence and body horror, set on a spaceship crewed by convicts dispatched on a perilous quest for alternative energy sources. Robert Pattinson plays a prisoner who refuses to donate his sperm to Juliette Binoche's breeding experiments.
HIGH LIFE - SECOND SCREENING
Claire Denis' first English language film is a stimulating mix of sex, violence and body horror, set on a spaceship crewed by convicts dispatched on a perilous quest for alternative energy sources. Robert Pattinson plays a prisoner who refuses to donate his sperm to Juliette Binoche's breeding experiments.
LUZ
Tilman Singer makes an impressive writing-directing debut with a slow-burning retro-styled chiller. After an accident, a young female cabdriver walks into a German police station, but the psychologist assigned to piece together her backstory has ulterior motives, and demonic possession may be on the menu.
SUPER MARIO BROS.
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo play Brooklyn plumbers who have to rescue Princess Daisy from a parallel dimension called Dinohattan, ruled by Dennis Hopper as a T-Rex in human form. Goombas and Bob-ombs galore in a lo-tech live-action version of the Nintendo game, directed by the creators of "Max Headroom".
DJ NIGHT: GOOMBAS ARE DANCING AGAIN
Soporozoite will heat up the dance floor with her game boys, musique 8-bit Bruxelloise, followed by a couple of DJs, DJ Mélodik Pinpon and DJ Benwa, who will be sure to raise temperature levels with even more 8-bit dance, video game music, basic electro...
THE KING OF KONG
Seth Gordon's enthralling documentary charts the rivalry between two Americans competing for recognition as highest scorer in Nintendo's Donkey Kong game. Hard not to side with the underdog, an amiable Seattle schoolteacher, when the reigning champ is a Florida hot sauce tycoon with a Mephistopholian beard.
COMBAT VIDEO GAME NIGHT
Game night starts here, with "Relaxer", the ultimate couch potato movie, followed by the mythical short "Kung Fury" (David Sandberg, 2015, 31'), in which a cop returns to the past to kill Hitler, the king of kung-fu. Expect dinosaurs that fire lasers through their eyes, a Barbarella viking, Thor, and many other delights. Meanwhile, the Nova bar will be playing host to a combat videogame tournament, with the final showdown to be shown on the big screen.
RELAXER
Joel Potrykus' no-budget chamber movie presents the ultimate couch potato survival challenge. The YK2 apocalypse is approaching, but an underachieving slacker vows not to get up from the world's scuzziest brown leather sofa until he has conquered Pac-Man level 267. You'll be glad this one isn't in Odorama.
VIDEO GAMES & FILM: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
This international conference examines the relationships between video games and film in more detail, especially in the field of adaptation. The following speakers will share the stage.
THE WOLF HOUSE
Maria runs away from a German cult in Patagonia and seeks refuge in a house in the menacing forest. The stop-motion images keep morphing before your very eyes in this beautiful but unsettling Chilean animation in which pigs sprout hands or people dissolve into streaks of paint.
RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
The girl sells disposable lighters in this South Korean gamer spin on Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale. Ju, a delivery boy, enters the game and has to save her from gangsters, organ harvesters and a lesbian Lara Croft on a motorbike. But is the girl fated to die anyway, or can Ju change their destinies?
JOYSTICKS
A nerd and a slob team up with the owner of a video arcade to thwart a local businessman's attempt to close the place down. Plenty of historic arcade action in this unabashedly lowbrow entry in the 1980s teen horndog subgenre, featuring vintage Space Invaders, Pac-Man scene wipes, and naked titties galore.
TRON
Welcome to The Grid! Disney's pioneering fantasy stars Jeff Bridges as a software engineer who gets digitally downloaded into a virtual reality and has to game his way out again via light-cycle races and illuminated frisbee-tossing. CGI was combined with more traditional animation to make this game-changer.
PROSPECT
A prospecter and his teenage daughter land their rickety spaceship on a remote moon, hoping to strike it rich. But the toxic atmosphere is the least of their problems in this smart sci-fi with a Western vibe and nice performances from Pedro Pascal ("Game of Thrones", "Narcos") and newcomer Sophie Thatcher.
AVALON
Mamoru Oshii, of "Ghost in the Shell" fame, made his live action debut with this mindfuck of a movie in which a gameplayer called Ash tries to discover the true purpose of an illegal virtual reality first-person shooter. Filmed in Polish in and around Warsaw; with a sublime score by Oshii regular Kenji Kawai.
ACE ATTORNEY
The Capcom video game gets a live-action makeover from Takashi Miike in family-friendly mode. Tongue-in-cheek courtroom fun, with wacky cartoon hairstyles, as rookie attorney Phoenix Wright defends a young spirit medium accused of battering her sister to death with a clock shaped like Rodin's The Thinker.
THE TRILOGY OF DEATH: AWAKENING, AFTERMATH, GENESIS
A trio of brilliant shorts by Nacho Cerdà illustrate three degrees of life versus death. In "Awakening", a boy falls asleep in the classroom and has an out-of-body experience. In "Aftermath", a coroner slakes his perverse desires on a corpse. And in "Genesis", an artist is consumed by his own sculpture.
THE KILLING OF AMERICA
This hard-hitting documentary about the collapse of the American dream into full-on dystopia is packed with uncensored newsreel footage of riots, serial killers and assassinations. It's a sledgehammer of a film, as relevant today as when it was made. Produced by Leonard Schrader, older brother of Paul.
EXISTENZ
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a game designer on the run after an assassination attempt in David Cronenberg's playful riff on virtual reality role-playing. Guns fire teeth instead of bullets; consoles plug into bioports at the base of the spine. But is any of this real, or is it just another level of the game?
BALANGIGA: HOWLING WILDERNESS
An old man, his 10-year-old grandson and their water buffalo trek over corpse-strewn landscapes after the Balangiga massacre of 1901, when Filipinos struck back against American occupiers. A picaresque and quietly devastating child's-eye view of war with a streak of magical realism and a dash of Jodorowsky.
NEKROMANTIK 2
Following on from the end of the first film, Rob's corpse is dug up and taken home by Monika, who has sex with it before sawing it up and keeping only the head and genitals. But her attempts to forge a "normal" relationship go horribly wrong after her new boyfriend finds Rob's meat and two veg in her fridge.
NEKROMANTIK 2
Following on from the end of the first film, Rob's corpse is dug up and taken home by Monika, who has sex with it before sawing it up and keeping only the head and genitals. But her attempts to forge a "normal" relationship go horribly wrong after her new boyfriend finds Rob's meat and two veg in her fridge.
THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET
A disgruntled ex-con decides to make snuff movies. Roger Watkins' legendary grindhouse nasty is as sick as they come, but is filmed with a certain sporadic flair, and tips its hat to Welles, Franju and Buñuel in between scenes of graphic disembowelling, drilling through eyeballs, and severed hoof-fellating.
GUINEA PIG: THE DEVIL'S EXPERIMENT & GUINEA PIG: FLOWER OF FLESH AND BLOOD
A woman is tortured to death in this Japanese "snuff" movie which purports to be found footage (and which upset Charlie Sheen so much that he asked the FBI to investigate). The artier sequel, in which another woman is dismembered and eviscerated, was directed by legendary horror manga artist Hideshi Hino.
DEATH ON FILM: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
International conference "Death on Film" with David Kerekes, Tina Kendall, Steve Jones, Johnny Walker en Jörg Buttgereit.
THE ROAD MOVIE
Buckle up for a wild and crazy ride through the mind-boggling insanity of Russian dashcam footage. Dmitrii Kalashnikov's deftly-edited compilation is bumper-to-bumper with hilarious, terrifying, horrific or just plain what-the-fuck moments on the road. All of human life is here, and never a dull moment!
THE ROAD MOVIE
Buckle up for a wild and crazy ride through the mind-boggling insanity of Russian dashcam footage. Dmitrii Kalashnikov's deftly-edited compilation is bumper-to-bumper with hilarious, terrifying, horrific or just plain what-the-fuck moments on the road. All of human life is here, and never a dull moment!
L'HEURE DE LA SORTIE
After a teacher's suicide, his replacement (Laurent Lafitte) becomes obsessed with a clique of exceptionally gifted teenage pupils who seem to be hiding something. Can he uncover their secret before it's too late? Sébastian Marnier's creepy thriller drip-feeds unease on its way to an apocalyptic climax.
SCHRAMM: INTO THE MIND OF A SERIAL KILLER
A lonely serial killer falls off a ladder and lies dying in a pool of his own blood while his miserable life flashes before his eyes. Reality and delusion intermingle in his memories of rape and murder, an obsession with the prostitute next door, vaginas with teeth, and hammering nails into his own penis.
SCHRAMM: INTO THE MIND OF A SERIAL KILLER
A lonely serial killer falls off a ladder and lies dying in a pool of his own blood while his miserable life flashes before his eyes. Reality and delusion intermingle in his memories of rape and murder, an obsession with the prostitute next door, vaginas with teeth, and hammering nails into his own penis.
THE DEATH KING
A rotting human corpse supplies the framing device for seven different segments, one for each day of the week, exploring the themes of murder and suicide played out in variously shocking, exploitative, poignant or surreal ways. Hermann Kopp's fantastic electro-industrial score provides the finishing touch.
THE DEATH KING
A rotting human corpse supplies the framing device for seven different segments, one for each day of the week, exploring the themes of murder and suicide played out in variously shocking, exploitative, poignant or surreal ways. Hermann Kopp's fantastic electro-industrial score provides the finishing touch.
WARGAMES
High-schooler Matthew Broderick uses his PC to boost his grades and impress girls by hacking into websites, but little does he realise "Global Thermonuclear War" is more than just a video game, and that his gleeful decision to nuke Las Vegas will trigger a countdown to Armageddon. An evergreen cautionary tale.
KILLING
An untested young ronin, living among farmers, must protect them from marauding outlaws. What at first may seem a surprisingly conventional small-scale chambara from the director of "Tetsuo" develops into a subversive critique of the samurai code, with Tsukamoto himself in the role of sage elder swordsman.
LES BAISEUSES
Two runaway girls in Brussels sell their bodies to horny old photographers before robbing them. They end up in a reform school where the lesbian warden uses them to service her sexual fantasies.
SHORTSCREEN
For the annual Shortscreen program, Offscreen and website Kortfilm.be present a selection of recent short films that fit the Offscreen criteria: original, unusual, bizarre, and surprising. The films will be introduced by the filmmakers.
BOILED ANGELS: THE TRIAL OF MIKE DIANA
In 1992, 25-year-old cartoonist Mike Diana became the first artist in the U.S. to be charged with obscenity when the FBI and citizens of Florida stumbled across his low-circulation zines. Henenlotter's documentary, narrated by Jello Biafra, is the troubling story of this ruling against freedom of expression.
DOMESTIK
Adam Sedlák's feature debut shows a cyclist going to extreme lengths in pursuit of peak fitness, while his wife is fixated on getting pregnant. Most of the film takes place in the couple's flat, where the artfully sterile aesthetic, ominous ambience and squirm-inducing body horror evoke early Cronenberg.
FROM HOLLY WITH LOVE
A young and beautiful Times Square hooker tells her "first trick" how she lost her virginity and ended up on the streets. "It all started last summer" at her sister's beach house with her boorish brother-in-law, a couple of beach bums, oral sex, hardcore penetration plus explicit self-service set to Debussy.
IN FABRIC
In the latest film from the director of "The Duke of Burgundy", a cursed red dress casts a spell over its wearers. A seductive, haunting ode to the timelessness of the ritualistic retail experience, with splashes of giallo styling, a bewitching score by Cavern of Anti-Matter, and a wicked sense of humour.
This movie will be introduced by director Peter Strickland.
A WOMAN'S TORMENT
A mentally unstable young woman, left to her own devices in an isolated beach house, loses her grip on reality and collapses into a maelstrom of violent delusions, fantasy and bloodlust. The result is an extraordinary mix of melodrama, hardcore sex and proto-slasher movie, with a big nod to "Repulsion".
THE TIFFANY MINX
A rich heiress seeks refuge in a remote villa to recover from an attempt on her life, but the danger follows her there. Unpredictable plot twists pile up post-haste, leading to a hard-to-guess denouement in this stylish mystery thriller that Findlay spices up with some of her hottest pornographic action.
CINEKETJE
Through 8 short films, a small furry animal overcoming its fear of the unknown, a man travelling around the globe, a pair of scissors exploring its environment, a bird roaming on the back of a caterpillar, a mini-cousteau going on an adventure in the oceans and other budding explorers show us how they discover the world around them.
MASTERCLASS ROBERTA FINDLAY
Underground filmmaker and connoisseur William Hellfire interviews Roberta Findlay, focusing on production aspects of the (s)exploitation industry from the 60s to the 80s. The career of this privileged witness and smart businesswoman offers the opportunity for a unique glimpse behind the screens of 42nd Street.
SNUFF
Deze controversiële sensatie begon als de low-budget horrorfilm "Slaughter" van Michael en Roberta Findlay. Zonder medeweten van de regisseurs, plakte distributeur/producent Allan Shackleton er een nieuw einde aan (waarin de film crew een moord pleegt) en promootte het als een waargebeurde snuff film.
SNUFF
"The film that could only be made in South America - where life is CHEAP!" An opportunistic producer took a grindhouse slasher movie called "Slaughter", added an epilogue showing the supposed director disembowelling one of his assistants, and passed off the footage as "real". And so an urban legend was born.
HOLIDAY
Sascha enjoys the perks of being a gangster's moll: emerald earrings, holiday on the Turkish riviera. But is there a price to pay for consorting with sociopaths? And if so, who will pay it? Eklof's stunning feature debut lulls you into uneasy acquiesence before punching you in the gut with a shocking payoff.
TENEMENT: GAME OF SURVIVAL
The long-suffering residents of a Bronx apartment block are besieged by ultra-violent drug dealers in the best of Roberta Findlay's horror films. This unjustly forgotten exploitation classic is set in the sleazy underbelly of Reagan's America, with New York City graphically depicted as an urban hellhole.
ANGEL NUMBER 9
Steven is a heartless womanizer who has no sooner dumped his pregnant girlfriend than he's killed in a traffic accident. An angel assigns him to return to Earth, but this time as a woman destined to fall in love with a man who will break her heart. Romance suffused with explicit sex and feminine sensuality.
THE ALTAR OF LUST
A young woman relates her sexual confusion to a therapist via surreal dubbing and explicit flashbacks teetering on the historical cusp between soft and hardcore. One year prior to "Deep Throat", a moustache-less Harry Reems gets it on with a belly-dancer. With a groovy soundtrack from Brit rockers Toe Fat.
THE KISS OF HER FLESH
Softcore proto-slasher in which one-eyed Richard Jennings (played by Michael Findlay) slaughters mostly naked young women in fiendish ways (electrified earring, poisoned semen, Butane torch...). The third entry in the deranged roughies trilogy on which Roberta Findlay collaborated.
ANIARA
Thousands of colonists leave a ruined Earth and head for Mars in this adaptation of an epic poem by Nobel laureate Harry Martinson. But the spaceship is knocked off course, leaving them facing a bleak future in which they must change their habits and find new meaning in their lives if they are to survive.
Cinema RITCS
THE EXORCIST
A terrifyingly plausible story in which a 12-year-old American girl (Linda Blair) is possessed by a demonic entity. When modern medicine proves powerless, her desperate mother calls on two priests for help. Popular and controversial from the moment of its release, this masterpiece of supernatural horror still leaves audiences shaken and disturbed.
CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
An anthropologist scours the Amazon rainforest in search of a film crew that went missing while making a documentary about cannibalism. Deodato's gruesome found footage masterpiece was banned in more than 50 countries, but lurking amid the explicit imagery is a savage critique of cultural imperialism.
UNDER THE SKIN
Roaming the cities and highlands of Scotland, a mysterious young woman (Scarlett Johansson) seduces lonely men and lures them to a secluded hangar where she reveals to them her true, frightening nature. A visually and aurally stunning vision of mankind as seen through extraterrestrial eyes.
NEKROMANTIK
Buttgereit's taboo-busting feature-length debut, shot on Super8, was hailed by John Waters as "the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs." Rob and his girlfriend Betty form a ménage-à-trois with a rotting corpse, but when Rob gets fired from his job, Betty leaves him – and takes the corpse with her.
Japan Square (Studio Skoop)
KILLING
An untested young ronin, living among farmers, must protect them from marauding outlaws. What at first may seem a surprisingly conventional small-scale chambara from the director of "Tetsuo" develops into a subversive critique of the samurai code, with Tsukamoto himself in the role of sage elder swordsman.
Budascoop
THE WOLF HOUSE
Maria runs away from a German cult in Patagonia and seeks refuge in a house in the menacing forest. The stop-motion images keep morphing before your very eyes in this beautiful but unsettling Chilean animation in which pigs sprout hands or people dissolve into streaks of paint.
KILLING
An untested young ronin, living among farmers, must protect them from marauding outlaws. What at first may seem a surprisingly conventional small-scale chambara from the director of "Tetsuo" develops into a subversive critique of the samurai code, with Tsukamoto himself in the role of sage elder swordsman.
KASKcinema
SUPER MARIO BROS.
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo play Brooklyn plumbers who have to rescue Princess Daisy from a parallel dimension called Dinohattan, ruled by Dennis Hopper as a T-Rex in human form. Goombas and Bob-ombs galore in a lo-tech live-action version of the Nintendo game, directed by the creators of "Max Headroom".
ACE ATTORNEY
The Capcom video game gets a live-action makeover from Takashi Miike in family-friendly mode. Tongue-in-cheek courtroom fun, with wacky cartoon hairstyles, as rookie attorney Phoenix Wright defends a young spirit medium accused of battering her sister to death with a clock shaped like Rodin's The Thinker.
Le Hangar
SHORTSCREEN
For the annual Shortscreen program, Offscreen and website Kortfilm.be present a selection of recent short films that fit the Offscreen criteria: original, unusual, bizarre, and surprising. The films will be introduced by the filmmakers.
Ciné Club de l'INSAS
RUN LOLA RUN
To avoid the worst from happening to her boyfriend, Lola has only 20 minutes to collect the sum of 100,000 German mark. The narrative structure of this modern version of "Bonnie & Clyde" is miles away from the Hollywood thriller but more reminiscent of that of a video game.
Offscreen photostream
