In this summary article: the different selections of the Festival, the movies we have seen and the palmares, tips to survive in Neuchâtel and the highlight: a concert by John Carpenter.
NEUCHATEL AND THE NIFFF
The NIFFF takes place every year around the first week of July in the cute lakeside little town of Neuchâtel whose only drawback is to be horribly expensive, like the whole Switzerland actually. You notice it when trying to find accommodation and when going to the restaurant where you have to be ready to pay up to 50% more than what you would do for the same meal in another European city.
This year JorafCinema stayed at the B&B Louis-Favre 21 that we can recommend for its recently renovated rooms and very friendly team. If you are interested in eating well and you can afford it, we can recommend the Brasserie Le Jura serving excellent meat, salad and cheese Fondue, or the Taverne Neuchâteloise serving even better cheese Fondues at all seasons.
More affordable are the tavern Les Brasseurs, the Italian restaurant Cercle National which serves a delicious Torroncino usually only found in Italy, and Le Bleu Café near the Cinema Bio that serves burgers. We do not recommend to eat at the tents in the English garden put in place especially for the Festival: the quantities are small and the prices high.
It is a good idea to complement some meals taken at restaurants with sandwiches that you can buy at the Theatre du Passage (catered by the restaurant Chez Max et Meuron) or any baker's, with salads or other dishes sold at the Migros supermarket downtown, or the good crepes from La Creperie in front of it.
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| The Temple du Bas theater (left) where it is advised to sit at the balcony and the small Cinema Bio (right) that lacks air conditioning. |
THE SELECTION AND THE PALMARES
The Festival movies were sorted into different categories, including the most prestigious International Competition. This year and unlike what we did at the GIFFF2016, JoRafCinema didn't try to see all movies from that competition to be able to formulate an opinion on the Jury's decision. Instead we went to see what we wanted according to the schedule constrains: up to five movies are always shown in parallel and we were present for only half of the Festival. All the movies we have reviewed can be found under this link.
Out of the 13 movies in the International Competition (Grave was removed at the last minute), we already knew February and in addition saw only the average Polish siren story The Lure, the nice Thriller Detour by Christopher Smith and the wonderful Italian super-hero movie Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot.
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| Gabriele Mainetti, director of Lo Chiamavano Jeeg Robot, answering JoRafCinema's question about the reception of his movie by the Italian audiences. |
The other categories are:
- New Cinema from Asia. The award of best movie went to Honor thy Father by Eric Matti, a Filipino director we know since watching his first movies in Udine. We liked the zombie animated movie Seoul Station.
- Films of the Third Kind and Ultra Movies. Unsurprisingly knowing my taste in movies, half of the ones I saw belong to those categories, out of which the best were the hilarious Comedy Mi Gran Noche by Alex de la Iglesia, the Norge disaster movie The Wave, the Belgian spooky The Ardennes, The Danish Polar A Conspiracy of Faith, the totally gross The Greasy Strangler produced by Elijah Wood, and Kevin Smith's second instalment in his True North trilogy: Yoga Hosers.
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| A scene from Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers. |
- Amazing Switzerland. Local productions of which we saw only one but can recommend it: Heimatland.
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| Four of the ten directors of Heimatland giving interesting insights on the production of the movie. From left to right: Carmen Jaquier, Lionel Rupp, Jan Gassman and Michael Krummenacher |
- Histoire du Genre: a selection of six Documentaries. We had already seen the interesting Le complexe de Frankenstein and regret missing Fear Itself at least.
- El Dorado - panorama of Latin America Genre cinema. This two-fold overview put the spotlight on the new generation of Latin American genre cinema on the one hand, and unearth the cult classics made between the 1950s and the late 1980s which influenced these new filmmakers on the other hand. Kudos to the NIFFF for that excellent initiative. I could only see the classics O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão (1968) and ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (1985), but will be on the lookout for the other 20 movies that were part of this selection.
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| Adrián Garcia Bogliano introducing one of the movies shown as part of the El Dorado retrospective. |
- John Carpenter retrospective: the NIFFF took the opportunity that the director was around for a concert (see below) to organize a retrospective of all the 18 movies he directed for the cinema. I have seen them all in the past and own them all in DVD, except for Memoirs of an Invisible Man, hard to find and expensive. I have even slowly started to convert them to Blu-ray when an new edition was released: The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live and The Ward. Thus I couldn't go to this retrospective to discover a movie, or to watch one on a big screen (as I heard people say at the festival) as I have a home cinema with projector. So my motivation to go watch Christine was just to see it in a room with a friend and other fans. It was nice to see this great movie again, but after the projection there were heated discussion on the interest of showing us a very aged 35 mm copy, shaky and out-of-focus, with poor sound and missing bits, instead of a pristine Blu-ray. It does make you feel some nostalgia for a foregone era, but spoils the pleasure of watching the movie as the director has seen it. I would thus not recommend to watch John Carpenter movies in those conditions. I am one of those who thing it would have been better shown in good quality, but maybe there was a question of cost or rights involved...
- Short Programs. There were three selection of short movies presented at the NIFFF2016 (Swiss, Asian and International) but I went to see only one, the latter. The six shorts composing the selection were all very different but interesting. The Norge Tunnelen is an anticipation story with good-looking CGIs, the French Hotaru is more ... French in that it looks cheaper but has a deeper meaning, the Canadian Portal to Hell! is a funny short starring the regretted Roddy Piper (They Live), the Argentinian Uncanny Valley has an interesting twist but that I had already seen in the episode 4.3 Hearts and Minds of the TV-series The Outer Limits, the Portuguese Arcana is a gross witch story and finally the Canadian La Voce makes you hear some Opera songs around its story of a man exchanging voices with people or animal he meets.
As you can see from the list of movies we have reviewed, even if only a small sample of the whole programming, there is a large variety of countries represented. No less than 22 countries were involved in the production of the 18 movies and 6 shorts we saw. Statistics provided by the NIFFF tell us that 130 movies were projected (including 29 shorts) from 42 production countries. The Festival invited 120 guests and counted 35000 movie tickets sold.
JOHN CARPENTER LIVE
One of the main motivations for me to go to the NIFFF this year, apart from the fact that it is a really nice festival in a nice town, was that one of my favorite director, John Carpenter, was going to play some of his compositions during a live concert on July 5th (actually one day earlier than first announced on the poster). In fact nowadays he is not anymore directing movies but focusing on his musical career, and is in particular touring the world with this concert. You can find out if he is playing in a town near you on this website.
The concert took place in the largest room of the Theatre du Passage. I feared that John Carpenter would not play too many of the theme songs we know and love because he is tired of them but more new compositions to sell CDs, while in fact because this tour is his first, he did actually play about 60% of good old themes and the rest of what he called lost themes and that you can find on two recently released albums (which I have ordered).
The setlist of the concert was as follows:
1. Escape From New York: Main Title
2. Assault on Precinct 13: Main Title
3. Vortex
4. Mystery
5. The Fog: Main Title Theme
6. They Live: Coming To L.A.
7. The Thing: Main Theme - Desolation (Ennio Morricone cover)
8. Distant Dream
9. Big Trouble in Little China: Pork Chop Express
10. Wraith
11. Night
12. Halloween Theme - Main Title
13. In the Mouth of Madness: In The Mouth Of Madness
Encore:
14. Prince of Darkness: Darkness Begins
15. Virtual Survivor
16. Purgatory
17. Christine: Christine Attacks (Plymouth Fury)
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| John Carpenter playing in front of a very please audience. |
I got goose bumps all along, in particular during They Live, the well-chosen end song Christine that rises in tension, and of course Halloween that the master introduced with a well-placed "I love Horror films, Horror will live forever!" loudly cheered by the audience.
I only regret that he didn't play the theme from Ghosts of Mars that I liked in spite of it being more recent and less cult than the older ones. I am sure it would have made the whole audience stomp their feet at the sound of that march.
The Lost Themes songs were also pretty good and in a similar style as his known compositions so that the audience could imagine scenes from not-made movies while those songs were playing and although nothing was projected on the screen at the back of the stage. Some songs reminded me of the band Goblin which composed for many movies by Dario Argento.
I would highly recommend this concert to any fan of Horror, John Carpenter and/or movie soundtracks (he is playing in Paris at the grand Rex on November 9th), although I found it pretty expensive (~ 60 euros) for 1h20 of pure pleasure.
Here is a short extract of the Main title theme of Assault on Precinct 13 that I recorded during the concert:
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