De la Iglesia’s A Sad Trumpet Ballad to open 29th BIFFF

18/03/2011

The 29th Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film (BIFFF) will run from April 7-19. In the past few years, this leading event in the genre has been attracting almost 60,000 viewers, making it the second most popular film festival in Belgium, after Ghent.

To open the hostilities, so as to elicit some forced laughter from viewers before they shudder with fear, the BIFFF has enlisted an old hand at the genre, Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, and his latest film, A Sad Trumpet Ballad [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Álex de la Iglesia
film profile]. The film wowed Venice 2010 jury headed by Quentin Tarantino, scooping the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards. It will be released in Belgium in June.

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Brit helmer Gareth Edwards will close the fest with his low-budget, sci-fi film Monsters [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which is scheduled for a Belgian release on April 20.

With only two titles – Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer (Germany) and André Ovredal’s The Troll Hunter [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andre Øvredal
film profile] (Norway) – Europe doesn’t exactly claim the lion’s share of the 11-strong international competition. However, BIFFF is hosting a European film competition, which will pick one of the finalists for the 2011 Méliès Award, and there are also plenty of European titles in the Thriller competition.

There is also a burst of Spanish films besides A Sad Trumpet, including Guillem Morales’s Julia’s Eyes [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Miguel Ángel Vivas’s Kidnapped [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Paco Cabezas’s Neon Flesh [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

Finally, the festival will also screen two highly original Belgian titles: Meant to Be [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Paul Breuls (most recently producer of Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), who specialises in English-language international co-productions; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Karminsky Grad, an unusual cocktail of Stalinists, terrorists and a pinch of the H-bomb, set in the heart of Wallonia.