The Twisted Apricot program returns to GAIFF on the festival's 20th anniversary with some new, old and unexpected twists that expose the traumas of the past and make chilling predictions for the future. In celebration of the festival's guest of honor, the producer extraordinaire Jeremy Thomas, the festival will screen Crash, David Cronenberg's provocative premonition of our 21st century malaises and one of the most scandalous films of the 1990s. Tingling our anxieties in a very different way is György Fehér's Twilight, a rediscovered and newly-restored classic from Hungary, which probes at the absolute evil living amongst all of us. And what better way to deal with all that horror than with some gore-filled comedy? Which is exactly what you'll get in Takeshi Kitano's new blood-soaked historical epic Kubi, fresh from its premiere at the Cannes film festival. Also ruminating on the unaddressed ills of the past is Chilean auteur Lisandro Alonso's latest enigmatic offering, Eureka, which works more like a spell, rather than a narrative film. It’s thrilling to see cinema's boundaries being pushed to their limits, which is why the Armenian premieres of two conceptual films by one of the most talented young contemporary artists from the Armenian diaspora, Garush Melkonyan, have found a fitting home in the Twisted Apricots section. Mysterious and visually stunning, Melkonyan's video works take their inspiration from a variety of sci-fi, arthouse and comedy tropes, but transform them into radically new means of storytelling and a questioning of our reality.
Vigen Galstyan
Vigen Galstyan