11/09/2025 - The Catalonian fantastic film festival will open with Julia Ducournau’s body horror Alpha and close with Francis Lawrence’s dystopian survival flick The Long Walk

Unspooling in the beach town of the same name, the 58th edition of the Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia (9-19 October) will highlight the best in genre cinema, ranging from the fully fantastical to the fantastical-adjacent. The event will open with Alpha [+see also:
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interview: Julia Ducournau
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interview: Julia Ducournau, Vincent Li…
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Through its run, the festival will also give out a handful of prizes, including the Grand Honorary Award to prolific Spanish actress Carmen Maura and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, the Time Machine Award to British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and Italian master of the spaghetti western Enzo G Castellari, and the WomanInFan Award to US producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, The Walking Dead series).

Sitges’ main competitive strand, the Official Fantastic Competition, for feature films not yet released in Spain, boasts a selection of European favourites from recent festivals, including Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prix winner A Useful Ghost [+see also:
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interview: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
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film profile]. Prizes in the section will go to the top films, and there will also be Awards for Best Director, Best Performances, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects and Best Music.

Sitges Collection, the strand of out-of-competition works comprising acclaimed films, features a handful of similarly recognisable works. These include Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia [+see also:
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Arco, the debut feature by French comic-book artist and animator Ugo Bienvenu, will pull double duty in both the Sitges Collection and the Anima’t section. The Berlinale Teddy Award winner Lesbian Space Princess by Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese will play in both Anim’at and the Noves Visions section, for films that dabble in formal experimentation. Other Noves Visions selections include Alireza Khatami's Sundance prizewinner The Things You Kill [+see also:
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Òrbita, which is dedicated to works “bordering on the fantastic”, includes thrillers, martial-arts flicks and adventure tales. Asian movies – or films somehow connected to Asia – often take a front seat in this section, leading to the inclusion of Gabriele Mainetti’s Forbidden City [+see also:
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film profile] and John Maclean’s samurai film Tornado, both martial arts-centric works with European production backgrounds. One award, for Best Thriller, will go to a film in the section.

As part of its membership of the Méliès International Festival Federation, Sitges will also hand out its Méliès d’Argent Awards for Best European Production in both the feature-film and short-film categories. The winning shorts of the Anima’t section and the Official Fantastic Competition for shorts will both immediately qualify for Oscar consideration.