The much-chatted about THE ORPHANAGE (“El Orfanato”), produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by J.A. Bayona, will be opening the
Sitges ‘07 Festival. The film has been enjoying great word-of-mouth since Cannes (check out the teaser at the end of the article), and is said to be on par with Del Toro’s fantastic Spanish Language flicks THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE and PAN’S LABYRINTH.
There are actually a boat load of awesome flicks, old and new, to be shown at Sitges, so why don’t I just share the press release with y’all! El International Film Festival of Catalonia will be opening its 40th edition with The Orphanage, by J. A. Bayona, produced by Guillermo del Toro.
Sitges 07 will be an important showcase for Spanish fantasy productions, represented by movies like Rec, by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza; Timecrimes, by Nacho Vigalondo; El Rey de la Montaña, by Gonzalo López-Gallego; Los Justos, by Manuel Carballo, or the animated film Nocturna, by Adrià García and Víctor Maldonado, among others.
In addition, the Official FANTÀSTIC Selection will include some of the season’s most awaited motion pictures like I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, by Park Chan-wook; The Fall, by Tarsem Singh, or Teeth, de Mitchell Lichtenstein (one of the big winners at the past Sundance Festival).
PREMIERE, an Official Category dedicated to out-of-competition fantasy genre films, will include Butterfly on a Wheel, by Mike Barker, a powerful horror thriller starring Pierce Brosnam, accompanied by Gerard Butler and Maria Bello.
Two of the Festival’s most extreme proposals are European films: the Irish Waz, by Tom Shankland, starring Stellan Skarsgård and Selma Blair, and À l’intérieur, by Alexandre Bustillo and Julian Maury, screened at the past International Critics’ Week in Cannes and considered to be one of the bloodiest movies in recent French cinema..
Another of the Festival’s big films will be 1408, the latest screen version of a Stephen King novel. Starring John Cusack and directed by Mikael Håfström (nominated for an Academy Award in 2003 for Best Foreign Motion Picture with Ondskan – Evil), 1408 has been described by critics as this year’s scariest ghost movie.
The Festival will be dedicating a retrospective to American Gothic, North American horror movies from the 70’s and 80’s (in collaboration with the San Sebastian Horror And Fantasy Festival), with the attendance of one of the main representatives of this school, director George A. Romero (creator of the classic Night of the Living Dead), who will receive the Time Machine Award.
In this cycle we will recover two films by the recently deceased Bob Clark and Dan Curtis, which are Dead of Night and House of Dark Shadows, as well as genre classics as important as Last House on the Left, by Wes Craven, or The Other, by Robert Mulligan.