The Sitges Festival pays tribute to 'Tron' in an edition that will bring the latest from Dario Argento

The International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, which will be held from October 6 to 16 in Sitges (Barcelona), bets on virtual worlds in the year in which the 40th anniversary of the film Tron, by Steven Lisberger, is celebrated, which has also inspired the poster of the 55th edition . The director of the contest, Ángel Sala, together with the director of the Sitges Foundation, Mònica Garcia, announced this Tuesday that, in addition to entering the metaverse, the festival will offer in its official section the new proposals from old acquaintances like Dario Argento, the Frenchman Quentin Dupieux and Peter Strickland, as well as the bands of names that are beginning to emerge such as Hanna Bergholm and Léa Mysius.

Less 'Masterchef' and more 'The kitchen brigade', an emotional look at unaccompanied minors

Know more

Also the feature film by Galician director Alberto Vázquez, who will present Unicorn Wars, an anti-war animation work with a French co-production, which has recently competed in the official section of the Annecy festival. Sala has not ignored the fact that in 1982 there were other films more followed by viewers than Tron, such as Steven Spielberg's ET, but he has stressed that Tron is a pioneering film, starring a young Jeff Bridges, which has influenced the genre by its narrative and will now allow debate among the festival audience. Other "forty-year-old" films are The Thing, by John Carpenter, and Blade Runner, by Ridley Scott, which at the time did not have the favor of the public, as has happened later.

During the presentation this Tuesday, Sala has not revealed which will be the film of the opening session and which of the closing, although the negotiations are already very advanced, and neither has he discovered any of the guests who will attend this year, waiting to do it in a few days. Influencing the films that have already been confirmed, he has indicated that Dario Argento returns with Ochiali Neri (Dark Glasses), with a blind young woman, who, with the help of a Chinese boy, will try to end a serial killer, in a work with a lot of blood as is the house brand.

Quentin Dupieux will present his last two films, “ncroyable mais vrais, an eccentric comedy about a married couple and the mysterious basement of their new home, already seen in Berlin, with a cast made up of Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker, Anaïs Demoustier and Benoît Magimel, as well as Fumer fait tousser, a satire of superhero movies, with demonic turtles, which has already been screened at Cannes in the official section out of competition.

The British Peter Strickland will offer Flux Gourmet, focused on a gastronomic group and its artistic concerns and power struggles, while from Finland will come the "crazy", according to Sala, Hatching, Hanna Bergholm's debut film, a family horror story, with monster included.

Léa Mysius, regular screenwriter for filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Jacques Audiard and Arnaud Desplechin, makes her directorial debut with Les cinq diables, halfway between a “thriller” and a drama with touches of the fantastic, shot at the foot of the Alps, with a girl with extraordinary olfactory sensitivity. The inaugural Cannes film, Coupez!, will also be in Sitges, a "remake" of One Cut of the Dead, directed by Michel Hazanavicius.

On the other hand, Ángel Sala has underlined that the festival, after two years of the coronavirus pandemic, is recovering the Òrbita section, dedicated to the “thriller”, announcing two of the South Korean titles that it will offer: Hunt, by Lee Jung-jae, star of The Squid Game, making his directorial debut, and Lee Sang-yong's The Roundup, a sequel to Kang Yoon-sung's 2017 Lawless City, already the biggest Korean film box office of the year

Mònica Garcia has stressed that the festival continues to work on the "visibility" of women creators of fantastic cinema and that is why a "short-teaser" on the genre is being convened, which, later, should serve as a “sample of a feature film idea”. Regarding this year's poster, she has said that she has re-created it by the China Madrid agency taking into account the aesthetics of Tron. After a time of restrictions, the marathons will return to Sitges and another of the contest's classics, the "Zombie walk", through the streets of the coastal town.