(For our previews of the films we planned to watch at this year’s festival take a look HERE)
(For our daily Blog entries take a look HERE)
46th Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival 11th – 29th October 2013
The organisers had promised that for 2013 they would be delivering a line-up “that will witness the re-birth of evil and its many faces“. Hardly surprising for a festival that’s devilishly had us squirming in and then jumping out of our theater seats for a decade.
While respectfully giving the devil his due the Corridorstyle festival program had been compiled, as ever, with consideration to our brothers from Korea, any homegrown (UK) talent on show, our personal celebrity faves and, of course, every tapas bar we’d not yet been banned from.
That approach resulted in a rather ambitious line up of 24 films for our 8 day stretch but while a couple of films did indeed hit the cutting room floor we also managed to snatch a few extra VHS cassettes from the Blockbuster $1 bargain bin and collapse over the finish line with 23 screenings scratched off the list.
We self-indulgently scoffed on Edgar Wrights’s Cornetto, but scoffed AT Refn’s Gosling custard pie. We uncharacteristically caught the eventual (official) winner of best film, though we thought relative newcomers Katz and Johnson gave the old maestro Warmerdam a run for his money. We managed a double helping of Sharlto Copley and a satisfyingly vengeful Korean one–two. One of us even took a stab at a Takashi Miike double bill which would have been unheard of down the Corridors of Style in years gone by.
While we’ve no real argument with the festival awarding BORGMAN the best film award, we decided the slightly more prestigious Corridorstyle Golden Claw Hammer should this year go to the simply genius THE DIRTIES. In writer director Matt Johnson we found someone who was everything we’d wish to be if we were an up and coming filmmaker, and seeing as how he’s doing such a stellar job we’ll leave him to it and just continue to sit around drunk in darkened movie theaters.
In terms of the festival itself 2013 underlined yet again what a sterling job Angel has done since taking it by the scruff of its money-hemorrhaging neck and dragging it to the top of the genre festival pile. Save for the odd projector hiccup, subtitles no-show, and (still) slack marshaling of the Twitter tourettes twats this is a fantastic film festival in every sense of the word.
And they’ve got the stats to prove it (and I quote):
“the Festival chalked up more than 9,500 references in media outlets, with an audience of 835,687,836 hits. With a total of 665 accredited journalists from 446 media outlets, 45 of which were international, and over 182,000 visitors at all of its venues, the Sitges Festival has become the number one genre festival in the world and a place where its fans are the real stars.”
As for our performance, well…………… as is now customary we drank too much, and as is now to be expected that led to missed screenings and missed trips to Barcelona. We marveled once more at The Hotel Galeon’s value for money and plundered its lavish buffet breakfast whenever we made it out of bed in time. We witnessed England once more qualify for a major disappointment tournament, and we put the world to rights at the steps of the almighty Road Cafe.
2014 will see the 10th anniversary of Corridorstyle’s attendance at the festival. Yeah! Something to celebrate. Get the beers in Manero!
Worthy of more than a mere footnote we’d nonetheless like to also mention here our thanks and gratitude to our very own special agent K who had decided to call time on Sitges and move on to pastures new. Though she’s far too nice to say it we’ve a feeling our childish shenanigans may have eased her decision to depart. To put up with us for the best part of a decade deserves some sort of CorridorStyle recognition.
Karen, we’ll name a drink after you in 2014 and use it to celebrate the good times with even more enthusiasm than usual.
For details of all the 46th edition films and awards go to:
46th Sitges Film Festival 2013 Awards
And here’s a list of the films we saw:
corridorstylefilms.com 