JoRafCinema: Report on the BIFFF2013

JoRafCinema has just spent 6 days at the Bruxelles International Fantastic Film Festival 2013, and here is a report of our impressions.
All reviews and articles related to the BIFFF2013 an be found under this link.

Director Martin Villeneuve presents his movie Mars et Avril, accompanied with production designer and comic books author François Schuiten.

What strikes us most with this festval is the variety of film selection.
> Variety of nationalities: we have seen around 20 movies issued from at least 12 countries: UK, USA, France as often, but also Irland, Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Indonesia and Lithuania.
> Variety of genre also to a lesser extend: in addition to the usual thriller and horror, there were some comedies, dramas, and poetic movies. The common ground being the fantastic aspect, that can show indeed plenty of faces. The fantastic comes not only via vampires, zombies and other monsters, but also via strange human behaviours, science/nature relationship, myths and legends, visions of the future, including apocalypse.
> Variety of quality: you will see that we have attributed ratings widely spread from 0 to 8, and we truely saw movies from awful (The Complex) to very good (Mars et Avril, my favorite [joe]), but none better than that.
> Variety of attendance: the BIFFF is known for its public that shouts comments and jokes during the projection, and this year was no exception. This mood is nice for the usual midnight splatter movie, that you are anyway looking with one eye only, but not when we tried to enjoy a slower-paced movie, more dramatic, and some people in the crowd couldn't appreciate the slow rythm. That was really annoying at times. Some people seem even to come more for shouting against or laughing at a movie than to watch it really.

Some more discreet movie enthousiasts like us, in there mid-thirties were the majority, but there was also a large number of older viewers, early George Romero fans, against very few younger.
Moreover it seems that the new location (Palais des Beaux Arts) also attracted a more traditional public, not especially versed in the Fantastic and Horror. And the selection answered perfectly to this expectation.

This new location offers one large and one small theater room, both converted to cinemas for the festival, plus a third room used for interview and some panels. The quality of the image and of better viewing angle, the comfort of the seats and the beauty of the room are much improved compared to the old location (Tour et Taxis, an exhibition hall!), but the sound is still as awful, high-pitched and gave me [joe] headaches. While there used to be one large hall for the bar, comics and DVD shops and ticket vending points, now all of this is spread around some labyrinthic galeries, which are often too crowded because very small. Having one pass for the week would have been also a good advantage, because making the queue every day in the 20 minutes before the first movie does not let much time to make both Watch the movies and Walk around the shops, while this is exactly what gives to a festival its charme. The beer at the bar was a good choice, La cuvée des Trolls.
I didn't notice last year, but this time the organization looked chaotic and it was hard to find one's way on the first day (where to we buy tickets, retreive internet tickets, how to enter the cinema rooms...).

In spite of some possible improvements, the festival was still a great experience, and I [joe] particularly liked the introduction speech in which was well summarized the common point of all people in the audience: the love for fantastic cinema in particular, and cinema in general, while I [raf] liked the way the directors or actors have been relaxed wrt other festivals.

Jo & Raf
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