From naked screenings, cosmic queer sci-fi, gothic horror scares and razor-sharp satires, the Fantastic Film Festival Australia returns to Sydney (Ritz Cinema, Randwick)with a selection of weird and wonderful cinematic offerings, from 21 April – 6 May 2022.
Australia’s premier event celebrating the cross-section of cult, genre and art house cinema have scoured the globe for this year’s lineup of films, presenting a selection of pioneering stories from auteurs unbounded by the limits of passion and imagination.
Fantastic Film Festival Australia goes beyond cinema to embrace more modes of creative expression. including the inaugural Music Video Blind Date, an event celebrating the best of our local music and filmmaking talent; and Cinema 1 Nightclub, a unique blend of live music, visual art and cinema, featuring DJ Female Wizard. You can also expect to find nude screenings, in-cinema DJ performances, Dungeons and Dragons, Q&As and exceptional short form work.
The Festival will open with the first screening of one of the most highly anticipated films of 2022, The Northman. an action filled Viking epic features an all-star that includes Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe. In true FFFA style, this will be an opening night with a difference, with the film at screening midnight. Tickets include drinks and DJ performance starting at 11pm.
After the success of last year’s nude screening, FFFA will host a 25th Anniversary screening of the award-winning comedy The Full Monty. Audiences are encouraged to embrace the spirit of the film and strip bare for a cinematic experience that won’t soon be forgotten.
Other highlights of the festival include Dreams on Fire, Starring one of Japan’s most celebrated dancers, Bambi Naka, in her first leading role, an electrifying journey through dance and underground culture, screening with a Q&A with Bambi and the film’s director on Monday 25 April.
As well as a 4K restoration of the 1981 cult film Possession. Originally cut for the US market and banned in the UK for almost two decades, this restored edition showcases the film as the director intended.
A personal favourite is THE TIME KEEPERS OF ETERNITY, animator Aristotelis Maragkos’ brilliant reimagining of the TV film, The Langoliers, starring Dean Stockwell. Maragkos painstakingly printed every frame of the movie to paper, reshaping it through black and white collage animation. Surreal distortions and reconstructions manifest the drama as literal tears and crinkles at the frame. The result is a film that uses its own form not only to express its unnerving narrative but to magnify the performance of its cast, and remain a supremely entertaining masterstroke of remix art.
Closing the Festival is New York Ninja. Originally shot in 1984 but not finished until 2021, the film chronicles the rise of John, a TV news sound technician turned vigilante. Painstakingly reconstructed and re-voiced in 2021, New York Ninja finally screens in all of its bombastic insanity, inanity and so bad its good glory, a treasure of trash cinema.
The full program of 22 feature films, 8 shorts and special events is on sale now at www.fantasticfilmfestival.com.au.
