Dark, bizarre, fantastic: Curated for the first time by Mattias Fabian and Matthias Eckkrammer, thisprogram section pays homage to European genre film in all its facets.
Everything’s Out of Control!
It is exactly at times when the world seems to be getting politically and socially out of whack and the chapped face of a supposed order is making grotesque grimaces that Night Sight connoisseurs will find: Life actually is like in the movies. With the only difference being that in the latter, a confrontation with loss of control and impotence is significantly funnier and, at best, even cathartic. Ignoring the anarchic jumble of reality or getting worn down by it is one strategy. The five works of this year’s Night Sight, on the other hand, provide an exciting change of perspective by purposely facing the absurd, inscrutable, and disruptive. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s aesthetically ravishing Eurospy extravaganza REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND, for instance, sees the repressed beat its way back to the surface, plunging the protagonist into a whirl of chaos and violence. The candy-bright animated slapstick SPERMAGEDDON, in turn, lets us empathize with the mindset of overly ambitious sperm cells whose identity-establishing drive to impregnate does not at all coincide with their pubescent producer’s sexual motivation. Speaking of internal body dissonance: THE UGLY STEPSISTER is Emilie Blichfeldt’s rendition of the well-known Cinderella story from the perspective of the eponymous character, whose control over her own body goes down the drain due to the pressure of toxic beauty standards. The Ukrainian-Belgian film U ARE THE UNIVERSE gives space trucker Andriy an incomparably more gigantic loss to deal with: Earth explodes. Fantastic Cinema’s answer to this disaster beyond all expectations is sarcasm and a return to the elementary traits of a human being. What is still left for us in the end is to hope for peaceful extraterrestrials, who will turn up just like in Black Hole from Estonia and offer us a path out of this misery. Night Sight will serve as a cosmic waiting zone until these aliens arrive. And don’t you worry: Everything here is out of control. (Mattias Fabian & Matthias Eckkrammer)
