First Word on Sitges 2013: Poster Debut; Takashi Miike Bringing Lesson of the Evil to the Fest
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The countdown has begun! Exactly six months from today Sitges 2013 will raise the curtain to a Festival that will include iconic Japanese director Takashi Miike, who has confirmed he will be attending the Festival with a brand new film: Lesson of the Evil.
From the Press Release:
The disturbing sound of a lullaby from hell will invade the streets of Sitges during the 46th Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, to be held from the 11th to the 20th of October 2013. The Festival’s poster – once again designed by the China Agency – recalls the birth of evil in an image inspired by Roman Polanski’s classic Rosemary’s Baby, which premiered the same year the Festival was born, and warning us that this year everyone wanting to come visit Sitges’ beautiful domains will have to protect themselves from the Prince of Darkness. Fascination with the fallen angel has been fundamental in universal fantastic cinema, with decisive films like Curse of the Demon (Jacques Tourneaur, 1957), Polanski’s above-mentioned masterpiece, the famous The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), and one of the big hits at last year’s Festival: The Lords of Salem by Rob Zombie.
And arriving at this disturbing Sitges is one of the masters of current moviemaking and a point of reference for today’s generations of filmmakers: Takashi Miike. Ten years after his first appearance in Sitges, Miike will be returning to a Festival that adores him and that considers him one of the main points of reference in current film.
Sitges will be honoring the prolific Takashi Miike and screening, in its Official In-Competition Fantàstic Selection, Lesson of the Evil, which explains the traumas of a psychopathic teacher. On the occasion of his presence in Sitges, the Festival will be programing a retrospective-tribute to Miike and publishing a book on him.
Sitges 2013’s main goal this year will be the selection of trend-setting films in the different branches of fantastic cinema and will be especially responsive to the generation of new talent and, above all, the consolidation of genre in Catalan film. In addition, the Festival is committed to investigating new forms of film creation and production, the diversity of screens, the impact of television on genre, and well as transmedia and other applications.
Sitges will also be celebrating the more than two decades of existence of two of its most representative sections, Anima’t and Seven Chances. Regarding the first, since 1992 it has become an important presentational forum for the best worldwide animation in feature and short format, aspiring to be, at the same time, a fundamental unifying force in the expansive Catalan animation industry. As for Seven Chances, coordinated with the Catalan Association of Film Critics and Writers, it has become a point of reference for that invisible cinema that resists reaching the movie listings and that has perfectly combined, throughout its existence, the concepts of genre and auteur.
The evocation of Rosemary’s Baby and the iconography surrounding this genre movie classic is the star of Sitges 2013’s poster, created once again by the China Agency, creators of the poster since 2010 and creatively responsible for the commercial since 2002. Miguel Ángel Duo, creative director, and Rafa Antón, executive creative director, along with Biel Capllonch, are the authors of this work. The remodeled image of the classic Sitges postcard (known as “the Point”) and the referential element of the poster from Rosemary’s Baby have been wed this year to project the Festival’s image.
Miguel Ángel Duo and Rafa Anton have summed up the creative process that went into making the Sitges 2013 image as follows: “When we approached this year’s image, we couldn’t help referring again and again to the great poster of Rosemary’s Baby. The image of the stroller outlined against the sky, with Rosemary’s face superimposed, has a brutal forcefulness, extremely disturbing only for what it suggests with no need to be explicit. This is one of the great merits of the poster and, of course, of Polanski’s film.”
Duo and Anton added, “We naturally decided that the stroller would be the star of our poster. In the film Polanski suggests that the baby might have been engendered by the devil himself. And in this context, an object that can symbolize the most naive thing is also a metaphor for the arrival of Satanism and horror in Sitges. We thought that something as simple as a stroller in flames in a corner of Sitges could have the evocative force that such a unique movie requires.”
For additional information visit the official Sitges Film Festival website.
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