Like every year or so, the Strange Festival served us a copious feast of bizarre nuggets and great classics on the sidelines. A look back at 5 films that found favor in our eyes.
From September 3 to 15, 2024, it was the 30th edition of the Etrange Festival at the Forum des Images, in Paris. An anniversary marked by a series of special screenings, drawn from the gigantic archives of the event (they even published a book) by various guests. It was the opportunity, for example, to discover the new copy of Ichi the Killerpresented by Noémie Merlant visibly happy to see the monument which marked her (too) young years again.
L’Etrange Festival also celebrated another anniversary: that of the magazine Screaming Metalwhose 50th anniversary was celebrated in a long, high-energy sessionhosted by the elite of comics from yesterday and today. It was, finally, the usual string of non-conformist classics and experimental micro-nuggets. Impossible to see everything, to taste everything. Ecran Large therefore favored recent productions that caught its eye. Two are missing: the excellent The Devil’s Bathto which we devoted a review, and Riverboomboth already released in France.
Celluloid Underground
While the superb Wild fig tree seeds is still in theaters, it is impossible not to return to this documentary recounting the meeting between Ehsan Khoshbakht, filmmaker now co-director of the Bologna festival, and Ahmad Jurghanian, a former projectionist who collects and attempts to preserve hundreds of film reels , posters and other relics, at the risk of his life.
Thanks to Khoshbakht’s bias, which emphasizes his own experience, and the gap between their two generations, Celluloid Underground not only depicts ordinary resistance to Islamic totalitarianism in Iran, but also the perseverance of popular culture in a world that only wishes it harm. These sometimes awkward dialogues between the two men reflect a whole spectrum of cinephilia put to the test, from semi-clandestine student film clubs to outright film smuggling.
And as is often the case, when it comes to the tragic history of this country, they look back at the pure and simple destruction of cultural life, which is absolutely never a given, but which will always try to find a way to survive. Almost as exciting as it is despairing, then.
Escape from the 21st Century
Each edition has its archetypal Asian blockbuster. Escape from the 21st Century, with its sci-fi teen movie feeldoes not exactly fit into this category. However, it represents the best of the best in contemporary Chinese entertainment. It’s very simple, we no longer know where to turn in this mash-up of frenetic genres that jump from character to character, from format to format (until it completely exceeds the cinemascope), faster than our synapses are able to prioritize information.
There is Detention by Joseph Kahn in this story of friends with the power to travel back and forth into the future. Of Everything Everywhere all at once Also. The staging embraces the codes and the infernal rhythm of internet culture, drawing the viewer into a pop whirlwind that is all the more delightful as the visual ideas burst forth from all sides. We come away exhausted, not sure we understood everything, taken aback to see subtitles in Chinese on the edges of the screen during the entire projection (?), but also delighted to have witnessed such a spectaclewith which Hollywood cinema only too rarely rewards us.
Memoirs of a snail
- Duration: 1h34
- Release: January 15, 2025 in theaters
It’s been since 2015 and his short film Ernie Biscuit that we hadn’t heard from Adam Elliot. The director of Mary and Max returns to us with a new feature film, and not the least. Memoirs of a snail tells the story of Grace Pudel, a little girl who is a fan of gastropods and mistreated by life. Here, the volume animation serves not to provoke wonder, but to underline the roughness of a cruel worldwhere the human being, although capable of sensitivity, can also be reduced to a grotesque form, rubbing shoulders with the morbid absurd during quite traumatic sequences.
The film is part of a theme that irrigated the festival this year: that of melancholy and depression, already present in The Devil’s Bath et The Young Woman with the Needlewinner of the Audience Award. Incapable of playing the tearjerker card, Elliot almost adopts the form of a picaresque novel to characterize the moods of his heroine, who faces trials of total cynicism with the greatest candor. Who better than an artist so dedicated to her art (the credits proudly claim the humanity of the creative team), what better than such a pretty animated film to tell the story of how she clings to this quality.
Duel in Monte Carlo del Norte
Besides Adam Elliot, another animation giant was in the spotlight: Bill Plympton. The filmmaker, whose radical independence put a few obstacles in the way of his co-producer invited to the screening, took a little longer than usual to finish his film, due to COVID. Slidetitle Duel in Monte Carlo del Norte chez nous, is a burlesque eco-western, telling the arrival of a particularly skillful cowboy in a disreputable town. When a Hollywood film shoot is planned on site, the managers will do everything to prepare the ground for them.
This is the opportunity, as you will have understood, for the director of attack both the film industry and the industry itselfdirectly or indirectly crushing everything in their path. It’s not an image: Plympton’s unique, often hilarious style reveals the literal distortion of bodies, settings and nature in a joyous mess of guns and gags, sometimes turning into pure experimentation . Fans of the man will be delighted. Others will discover a great artist.
House of Sayuri
This edition was also that of the subversion of codes. When Can Evrenol gave us a rape and revenge as aggressive as it was politically virulent (Sayara), the Japanese veteran Kôji Shiraishi proposed to mishandle the clichés of J-Horror a little. He is well placed to do so: in more than 30 years of career, he has worked in numerous sub-genres within Japanese horror, found-footage (Noroi : The Curse) au torture porn (Grotesque).
A long-haired ghost, a suburban house, teenage girls in uniform, a newly arrived family… It’s all there. But just when we start to tire of it, he turns all the issues around with a comic twist designed for festivals and begins to caress these archetypes against the grain. To do this, it propels a secondary character to the head of the story and makes it instantly great. The result is not perfect, far from it. But this clever mix of parody and homage (the love for this culture of which he was the architect is sincere) regularly hits the mark and does honor to the name of the festival.
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