The Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival under the sign of literature

The 31st edition of the Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival (Vosges) opens Wednesday evening and returns to the foundations of literature. The festival will see long and short films compete with jury presidents from the literary world.

An unmissable event for fans of the genre, the 31st edition of the Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival will, this year, “rest on its foundations, literature and mythologies”, explains its director, Bruno Barde. Long and short films will compete this Wednesday, January 24 in the evening, with jury presidents from the literary world. Last year, the public and jury crowned the same film, La Pieta by Eduardo Casanova, recalls Bruno Barde. “It’s quite a difficult and demanding film, and I told myself that Gérardmer’s audience had reached maturity.” Reason why Bruno Barde decided to return to “what grounds us, and it’s mainly writing”he says, citing as an example Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

This “tribute” to literature is reflected in particular by the choice of presidents of the feature film and short film jury: the journalist, author and director Bernard Werber, and the author Bernard Minier. “The fantastic is not just ugly, it’s not just zombies, it’s also poetry, it’s dreamlike, magical”, continues Bruno Barde. The selection “is a mirror of the world”, according to him. Around 250 films were viewed to arrive at this selection of around thirty works.

“World reference”

The Forbidden Play by Hideo Nakata (Japan) will open the ball Wednesday evening, when other feature films including Perpetrator by Jennifer Reeder, Sleep by Jason Yu or Waiting for the night by Céline Rouzet will be broadcast over the days to try to win the Grand Jury Prize on Sunday. “I’m more into fantasy cinema than horror cinema, I like suspenseful stories”says Bernard Werber, “honored” to have been chosen to chair the feature film jury.

“As president, I will favor the scenario more than the hemoglobin or violent aspect“, adds the author of the trilogy The antswho was also director of Our friends the Earthlings (2006). The important thing is “the ability to keep the spectator in suspense, so that he forgets his daily life and is only concerned with what will happen to the characters”, according to him. Five short films are also in competition against a jury chaired by Bernard Minier, author whose first novel, Iceappears in the Sunday Times list of the 100 best thrillers published since 1945.

A retrospective on the theme of vampires is offered, including Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola (1992), Nosferatu the vampire (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922) or The Vampire Ball (Roman Polanski, 1967). Some 600 volunteers participate in the success of this festival, which has become “a world reference”, underlines Bruno Barde. Some films do not yet have distributors and find them in Gérardmer.