The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival’s final day kicked off by wrapping up its body horror retrospective with Philip Brophy’s Body Melt (1993). MMC! imagined an Arrow Video edition of the film earlier this summer, back when word of its restoration began circulating. The film now has a packed Blu-ray release compliments of Vinegar Syndrome, bringing this lesser known wonder to the world. The SFFF paired Body Melt with Chris McInroy’s practical effects-based We Summoned a Demon (2018), a fun and goofy short about a couple of guys who just want to be cool and end up summoning a demon. Overall, a fun way to start the Festival’s end.
Finland
5 Great Reasons to Attend the Buried Alive Film Festival – The November 15th Edition!
MMC! will cover the 2018 Buried Alive Film Festival by previewing each day of its programming, focusing on those wonderful films that achieve MMC!-approval!
With BAFF’s emphasis on short films and a full program of these titles playing each day the Fest, there’s hardly any limit on the number of good reasons to attend! BAFF kicks off on November 14 with a screening of the films made as part of its 3rd annual Sinema Challenge, a 13 day filmmaking challenge that sees its participants randomly select a horror genre and a subject from a deck of Cards Against Humanity cards and then make a movie based on their selections.
The Fest’s main program starts on November 15 with a feature, a supporting short film, and BAFF’s first short program: “For the Love of the Undertaker.” For those counting, that’s thirteen separate works in a single evening of film fest-ing! There’s lots to enjoy, but here are MMC!‘s five favourite reasons to BAFF next Thursday.
SFFF Day 2 – Chillin’ with the Villains
The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival went globe-trotting to start Day 2. The “Drawn from Around the World” block of animated shorts offered some enthralling works. Many conveyed a sad or lamenting poignancy. Keiro (Tatiana Jusewycz, Benoît Leloup, Franck Menigoz, Zoé Nérot, and Charlotte Poncin, 2016) traced a girl’s journey to adulthood and its effect on the giant creature that accompanies her, Beyond the Books (Jérôme Battistelli, Mathilde Cartigny, Nicolas Evain, Maéna Paillet, Robin Pelissier, and Judith Wahler, 2017) envisioned the highly detailed collapse of an impossibly immense library, the Spanish short Dead Horses (Marc Riba and Anna Solanas, 2016) revealed the brutality of war from a child’s perspective and amid fabric devastation, and the Indian film Schirkoa (Asian Shukla, 2017) imagined political strife in a world where citizens wear bags and boxes on their heads. Others brought the funny, like Daniel Sterlin-Altman’s Hi, It’s Your Mother (2017), about motherhood, blood loss, and middle class living told in crude claymation, and Deuspi (Megacomputer, 2017), a very short work about a pair of astonishingly inept stick-up men and their hilarious fates.
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (Juho Kuosmanen, 2016)
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki.
In the summer of 1962, small town Finnish baker Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) has a shot at the world featherweight boxing title held by dominating American champion Davey Moore. Olli is thrust from his countryside home into a fraught training camp with the pressures of national stardom and a draining publicity circuit, but he has bigger problem – he has just fallen in love with a sweet country girl (Oona Airola) and can think about little else. Based on a true story, Juho Kuosmanen’s exquisitely lyrical, verité-styled inversion of the sports biography won the Un Certain Regard Prize, charming Cannes audiences with its gentle humor and bittersweet romance.
Disc Features:
- High-definition digital master, supervised by cinematographer Jani-Petteri Passi, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with director Juho Kuosmanen, production designer Kari Kankaanpää cinematographer Passi
- New interviews with actors Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola, and Eero Milonoff
- Roadmarkers (2007), Citizens (2008), and The Painting Sellers (2010), three award-winning short films by Kuosmanen
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A new essay by critic Manohla Dargis
Rare Exports Inc. (Jalmari Helander, 2003) and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions (Jalmari Helander, 2005)
Christmas is nearly upon us and MMC! wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays with this pair of short films by Jalmari Helander. These wonderful shorts take the “Murder Santa” trope into weird, fantastical places. For those looking for more, we recommend Helander’s 2010 feature elaboration, Rare Exports.
Merry merry, happy happy, everyone!
The White Reindeer (Erik Blomberg, 1952)
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films present The White Reindeer.
Shot in the Arctic Circle’s snowy expanses, Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer is a marvel of film fantasy. Pirita, played by the director’s wife, Mirjami Kuosmanen, is a bewitched young woman wed to an often-absent reindeer herder. Longing for affection, she carries out a sacrifice to empower a local shaman’s love potion and becomes cursed, transforming into a white reindeer by night and drinking the blood of local hunters. Based on an old Lapp saga, The White Reindeer blends documentary travelogue with avant-garde experimentation and produces an art house horror film without compare, winning the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and granted the prize for Best Fairy Tale Film at the Cannes Film Festival by Jean Cocteau’s presiding jury.
Disc Features:
- New high-definition digital transfer of the film featuring 7 minutes of material not included in previously restored versions, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Seven short films by Erik Blomberg: With the Reindeer (1947), From the Lemmenjoki River (1948), Gold and Sand (1948), Thirty Years of Work for the Finnish People (1948), Open the Way for Our Flags (1949), Before the Opening Night (1949), and The Beauty Pageant 1955 II (1955)
- Kodin värit, Blomberg’s theatrically released commercial for the Tikkurila paint company
- Trailers
- Photo Gallery
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Henry Bacon
Make Mine Criterion! 