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If you're a genre fiend with a taste for the low-budget and oddball, you might have noticed Kenichi Ugana's name appearing time and again over the past few years at festivals such as Fantasia, Japan Cuts, and Nippon Connection. With his career beginning only a decade ago, the director of Visitors and Love Will Tear Us Apart has been astoundingly prolific, with four new films released within the past twelve months. Now, Ugana has been unleashed upon the audience at TIFF's Midnight Madness, the most prestigious international stage that a quirky Japanese genre comedy has seen in some time. The film in question is The Gesuidouz, a low-key but appropriately noisy farce about a group of aspiring punk musicians and their love of horror films....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Killer Films producer Christine Vachon, Mubi’s chief content officer Jason Ropell, and Fatih Abay, diversity and inclusion officer at the European Film Academy are among the international speakers heading to the industry programme of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff), taking place until July 8 in the Czech Republic.

The recently restored Imperial Spa will house the entire industry programme. It’s wood-panelled interiors will host the Industry Days’ Eastern Promises for four days of project pitches, talks, events, and workshops as well as the Film Industry Office and Lounge. There is an afternoon forum dedicated to...

I love a good anthology which is probably why I keep making them. And with the Bloody Disgusting-powered Screambox, we love finding diamonds in the rough and bringing them to you.

Today we announce the acquisition of Body Parts, a South Korean horror anthology featuring the works of Won-kyung Choi, Byeong-deock Jeon, Jisam, Jang-mi Kim, Gwang-Jin Lee, and Wally Seo.

In the film…

“Si-kyung, the youngest reporter, infiltrates an unnamed religious group. Invited to a special ceremony, she witnesses strange things happening in the prayer house. Five sacrifices and five stories are offered by the people who desperately wait to be heard by their god. When the story is over, she too must make a sacrifice.”

The religious horror anthology streams on Screambox and all Digital Platforms July 30, 2024.

In the meantime, you can check out these other anthologies on Screambox: CreepyPasta, Night of the Missing, Visitors, Vietnamese Horror Story, Sinphony,...

Brazil’s Fantaspoa film festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and the festival is breaking numerous records, presenting an impressive total of 114 feature films, 22 of these as World Premieres, marking the largest number of feature films in Fantaspoa’s long history.

The final selection of feature films for Fantaspoa’s highly-anticipated 20th edition has been exclusively presented to Bloody Disgusting, so read on for everything you need to know!

The festival tells us this week, “With a diverse selection, the feature films screening at Fantaspoa Xx have been divided into seven distinct competitive categories: International, Ibero-American, National, Documentary, Animation, All-Nighter, and Low Budget, Great Films. These categories promise audiences a variety of cinematic experiences, from the fringes of horror and fantasy to the depths of the human imagination.

“In addition to feature films, Fantaspoa will screen 123 short films, totaling 237 participating works, making this edition of the festival the largest in its history.

Paris-based Urban Sales has acquired Jean-Claude Monod’s queer period drama Girl For A Day and Jul and Jean-Paul Guigue’s hybrid animation Silex And The City and is launching sales for both films at Unifrance’s Paris Rendez-Vous next week,

Set in the 18th century, Girl For A Day is Monod’s debut feature and is based on the true story of a person called Anne Grandjean who was urged to dress as a man and change her name due to her attraction to women, and was then brought to trial. Marie Toscan stars alongside Call My Agent’s Thibault de Montalembert,...

“Art should be painful. It’s like if you have a boil, you want to lance it to get the pus out. Art should be like an art-opsy. It releases the tension. Art’s not a happy thing.” That's a Variety interview with director Godfrey Reggio, the legendary director behind the Qatsi trilogy who hasn't released a film in a decade, since Visitors. But boy, is he back, and with the help of Naqoyqatsi editor Jon Kane as editor and co-director. Their creation, Once Within a Time, is a perfect "art-opsy" and a truly unique experience.

People may not be familiar with the 20-year-long Qatsi trilogy, but they were produced by a few of the greatest American directors and had some of the best film scores of all time, thanks to Philip Glass. Their formal experimentation, absence of dialogue, and stunning technological processes depicted a world out of balance, drifting...

Godfrey Reggio helped shape the syntax for contemporary commercial advertising, not to mention the music video, with his trilogy of experimental non-narrative films that began with 1983’s Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio’s autodidactic films require users to create their own meaning through the collision of hyperkinetically edited imagery with composer Philip Glass’s evocative music. At 83, Reggio isn’t resting on his laurels—or courting them at all.

After slowing down his rhythm to focus on extended shots trained on human faces in 2013’s Visitors, Reggio’s newest film, Once Within a Time, finds him once again working with more involved edits and compositions. Don’t call it a return to form, though, because he crafted something that looks and sounds quite different. The 52-minute short, co-directed with Jon Kane (who edited 2002’s Naqoyqatsi), conjures the look of Georges Méliès-era, hand-tinted frames while utilizing modern effects to overwhelm the dense frames with information.

Godfrey Reggio, creator of the Qatsi trilogy, has been down this road before. The obsessions are familiar — nature’s innocence corrupted by industry, technology and the atomic age — but the audience is presumably different. This time, it’s younger. Now in his 80s, the avant-garde filmmaker who, in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, found a new cinematic language to caution people of their impact on the environment, has now turned his attention to kids.

With “Once Within a Time,” Reggio communicates his fears about the pitfalls of progress to the generation he’s counting on to fix the messes grown-ups have made of this hand-me-down planet, using circus-trained acrobats, a next-dimension soundtrack and Mike Tyson (of all things) to get his message across. At well under an hour (just 43 minutes before credits), the project presumes a different attention span than the ex-monk’s groundbreaking 1982 essay film, “Koyaanisqatsi,” which used slow-motion,...

A pack of wolves howls at a massive iPhone that’s propped up in the snow like a monolith, an image from George Méliès “A Trip to the Moon” frozen on its screen. A steampunk Trojan horse — or is it an ark? — delivers a fleet of small children into the future, where they’re greeted by a marionette wearing a mask of Greta Thunberg’s face. Mike Tyson, dressed in the most fantastic Afrofuturist chic, pumps up the youngest survivors of a nuclear and/or robot-induced apocalypse in the middle of a boxing ring that’s held together with actual ropes.

These are just some of the surreal but stiflingly hyper-legibible sights on display in Godfrey Reggio’s “Once Within a Time,” a 43-minute curio that would seem to find the “Koyaanisqatsi” director venturing beyond the time-lapse technophobia that made his documentary work so iconic. And to a degree, it does,...

Expanding on his homonymous short from 2021, Kenichi Ugana has now come up with a feature version of “Visitors”, which has added two more arcs in the initial story.

“Visitors Complete Edition” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative

In the first, Haruka, Nana, and Takanori visit the house of Sota, a band member who has not given any sign of life for quite some time. The house looks particularly run-down with newspapers covering every window, while Sota seems even more strange, looking a mess and acting like nothing is going on. As he calmly offers them tea, one of the girls steps into a green goo and transforms into a head-spinning, bloodthirsty demon. The trio feel death coming upon them, but Haruka takes things in her hands.

Check also this interview Interview with Kenichi Ugana: Freedom of expression cannot be taken for granted

In the second arc, the...

Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired North American rights to “Once Within a Time” from Godfrey Reggio, the experimental filmmaker behind the cult masterpiece “Koyaanisqatsi.”

The indie studio will release “Once Within a Time” theatrically in the fall of 2023, following its premiere as part of The Museum of Modern Art’s film series “Total Cinema of Sight and Sound: Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass,” which runs Sept. 26 – Oct. 4.

The movie is co-directed by Jon Kane, with original music is composed by Philip Glass with additional music and vocals by Sussan Deyhim. Glass, a legendary experimental composer, first worked with Reggio on “Koyaanisqatsi,” which was “presented” by Francis Ford Coppola in 1982. Reggio and Glass have collaborated on seven films over the last four decades, including “Visitors,” “Evidence,” and “Anima Mundi.”

“Once Within a Time” is produced by Mara Campione, and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, Alexander Rodnyansky, Lawrence Taub, Michael Fitzgerald and Dan Noyes.

This film’s daytime-soap vibes render an unquestionably inspiring true story into an experience that feels entirely false

There is much to be inspired by in the real-life story of Jessica Watson, who, at 16, famously set out to become the youngest person to sail solo, nonstop and unassisted around the world. But translating that solitude-filled 210 day voyage into interesting drama for the screen is no easy task - as director Sarah Spillane’s gloppy, goofily executed and terribly twee Netflix film reminds us. It’s impossible to predict how any title will fare on the streaming platform, but I’ll be surprised if this one isn’t quickly lost in the algorithms.

Every narrative involving arduously long trips across intimidatingly large bodies of water must at some point reiterate the traveller’s loneliness. In the 2003 Australian thriller Visitors, Radha Mitchell delivers a rousing performance as a young woman also sailing solo around the world,...

The power of sound and the impacts of war dominated the 26th Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival awards, with French doc “07:15 – Blackbird” taking home both the main prize and the cinematography award.

The story of a young girl’s quest to identify the call of a mysterious bird, directed by Judith Auffray and filmed by Mario Valero, the 30-minute doc’s “fairy-tale poeticism,” balancing natural wonder and technology, won over the Opus Bonum jury. The jury said the film “draws us back to the mysteries of our existence.”

The closing gala, after the fest’s focus on war films and a strong presence of Ukrainian filmmakers and their work, paused to honor the fallen in Ukraine as a choir took the stage to sing a traditional hymn, “The Duckling Swims.”

Croatian doc “Deserters,” a study of letters from young Balkan war resistors by Damir Markovina, won the Central...

Lionsgate will be giving the supernatural horror film Devil’s Workshop a theatrical, digital, and VOD release on September 30th, and with just a couple weeks to go until that date arrives we’ve gotten our hands on a red band trailer for the film. You can check it out in the embed above.

Written and directed by Chris von Hoffmann, who previously directed the horror thrillers Drifter and Monster Party, Devil’s Workshop has the following synopsis:

Struggling actor Clayton is desperate for a role as a demonologist. He contacts Eliza, an expert in devil lore, to help him prepare and spends the weekend at her home. Eliza forces Clayton to confront his troubling past, perform dark rituals, and sacrifice a goat. Does she want to help Clayton, seduce him… Or destroy him? The shocking climax will set your soul ablaze.

The film stars Timothy Granaderos (13 Reasons Why) as Clayton and...

Grab ahold of your gondolas, the Venice Film Festival has unveiled its lineup.

While Oscar winners can have their origin anywhere, recent years have shown that Venice, which kicks off on August 31, is the proper starting gun for awards season. Here are 10 debuts that have a good shot at staying in the conversation for a while:

“The Banshees of Inisherin”—Martin McDonagh’s first movie since “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” stars Brendon Gleason, Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan, and Kerry Condon. It’s based on one of his plays, the third chapter in the “Aran” series, which includes “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” This is the first time he’s adapted one of his stage pieces for film. Searchlight is distributing.

“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”—One of Netflix’s big bets for this year’s awards season, this is believed to be...

A Flower in the Mouth.There is a common thread between two otherwise disparate premieres in the Forum section of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival—Eric Baudelaire’s A Flower in the Mouth, shot in France and the Netherlands, and Dane Komljen’s Afterwater, shot in Germany. Both films benefited from the direct involvement of the Jeonju Cinema Project: an extraordinary funding and development initiative undertaken in partnership with the South Korean city’s local government and the programming team of its annual film festival. Together, these two works mark out something like a gesture of intention for the project. Baudelaire’s film is a rich, single-setting response to the demands of microbudget filmmaking and pandemic strictures both, particularly in its second half, which transposes a 1922 Luigi Pirandello play to an all-night café in Paris. Meanwhile, Komjlen’s film is a more ephemeral vision overall, composed largely...