Author Archive | Andy VB

We are beyond excited to welcome alum, Alex Phillips, back to the festival this year with his debut feature, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. It is a surrealist and vibrantly twisted tale that follows a trio as they careen down a rabbit hole after ingesting hallucinogenic earthworms. Riveting though highly disturbing, the film is not meant to induce pleasure, but instead repulsion and even anger. It is an absolute trip. 

You wrote this film as well as directed it.[…]

Women laced into tightly wrought corsets; femme fatales shrouded in shadow; a precocious detective with a sharp wit. Each image evokes something particular, connects to a collective association with a specific genre. This association comes with preexisting knowledge, an awareness about what symmetries define that genre and what it means or represents as a category. This recognizability can be both helpful and detrimental, the latter happening when something gets too bogged down in tropes and conventions rather than its own narrative.[…]

We are incredibly excited to be hosting Finnish filmmaker and poet Mikko Myllylahti at the festival this year. His film The Woodcutter Story, also shown at Cannes this year, is set in an unnamed Finnish timber village in the far north during the pervasively dark winter. Deadline calls the film “deeply melancholy, strange, and surreal.” Myllylahti is both a director and writer and has received prizes for the 2016 film he wrote, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki. […]

As usual, there are several films that are the official submissions for their country in the Best International Feature Oscar category at this year’s Festival, hoping to make the Academy Awards shortlist and eventual select list of five nominees. To even be selected as the submission and placed in contention for nomination is a significant honor for these films and their filmmakers. The process involves an Academy-approved committee or jury (which must include film industry artists and craftspeople) who select the film for their country.[…]