- According to the coordinator of the Festival’s wildest section, film critic and writer Jesús Palacios, this edition rescues four small acts of resistance of the truly freak in a panorama in which everything is freak
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Thursday, March 23, 2023-. “The small acts of conscious and unconscious resistance that represent the hard-fought survival of the truly freak in an international panorama in which everything is freak, come from the farthest corners of the planet. But these acts run the risk of getting lost in the tangle of digital platforms, virtual premieres and (a)social networks, without ever finding their necessary and needed audience,” that’s what The Freakiest Night is for, to track them down and show them to their audience. At least that’s what the programmer, film critic and writer Jesús Palacios says in the catalog of the 22nd Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, a respected authority in the “truly freak” sphere that coordinates since its inception the festival’s wildest section, which offers an anthology of fantastic and horror films that have been exported and embraced by other film festivals.
And with this inclination comes a program made up of a series of titles that Palacios sees as “small bushes, magic mushrooms and green sprouts of real freak vocation that emerges from the darkest and most hidden corners.” In fact, he points out that this cinema is “increasingly elusive” because it is hidden in the “deceptive freakism planted and cultivated by big companies and audiovisual corporations.”
Once again, the section consists of two different screenings that, in both cases, include a short and a feature film, respectively. They will take place at Cinesa El Muelle on Friday, April 21, and on Saturday 22, at 10 p.m.
This edition will show two Spanish short films: Phonorama, a new work by Álex Rey, “our most original animated filmmaker”, recalls the film critic, and Parking, the short film debut of professional photographer Pepe Castro.
About the former, Jesús Palacios says that it is “quantum fiction -as well as grotesque-, in 2D animation format” and he places it “between Stanislav Lem and Jardiel Poncela, Asimov and Hitchcock, to the greater glory of Nicolas Cage and Professor Bacterio”. When talking about Parking, the coordinator of the section warns us: “If López Vázquez and Merceron put an end to telephone booths, now you won’t know where to leave your car”.
The feature films are also framed in The Freakiest Night’s vocation that Palacios stands by: to survive as “the last stronghold to defend ourselves from superheroes, televised zombies, Mandalorians and elevated terrors”. Thus, this year’s section includes “the most surprising and Martian proposal of the fantastic genre”: the French La gravité, by Cédric Ido, a work that, as the author of the catalog text points out, “has passed under the radar of festivals such as Sitges or Donosti Terror, having its Spanish premiere in the degenerate genre section of the last Gijón Film Festival”. On the other hand, Legions by Argentinean Fabián Forte is described as “original”, (…) “irresistibly likeable, diabolical”. The programmer notes that it is “a hallucinatory journey into the depths of the mind with one foot in the geriatric comedy of manners and the other in Evil Dead.
Jesús Palacios closes the catalog text by stressing that: “Not everything happens here everywhere all at once: it happens only tonight, at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival. You better not miss it”. And for those who don’t want to miss it, the Festival reminds that tickets will soon be available in advance at the box office or on the website of Cinesa El Muelle and that the screening order will be as follows: Friday, April 21, Phonorama and La gravité; Saturday, April 22, Parking and Legions.
Selection
La gravité (The Gravity), by Cédric Ido, (France, 2022, 85 min.)
Parking, by Pepe Castro (Spain, 2022, 12 min.)
Legions, by Fabián Forte (Argentina, 2022, 98 min.)
Phonorama, by Alex Rey (Spain, 2022, 13 min.)
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