Scandinavia’s biggest genre film event Night Visions International Film Festival has announced the full lineup of its April 2022 edition. Having made an unofficial world record of moving the dates of a single festival in 2021 by postponing the event seven times in a row due to local covid restrictions on cinemas, the Nordic region’s number one genre film event is finally returning on full scale to the screens in Helsinki, Finland.
The Official Selection of 34 features and a handful of shorts is showcased in a total of 50 screenings. Festival events are spread over five days at three different venues in downtown Helsinki. The festival also now goes back to the tradition of wrapping the event up with an all-nighter. This particular tradition, originally established at the festival’s first-ever edition in 1997, has been on hold since the pandemic hit the fan and it’s now revived on the night of Saturday, April 23.
The most anticipated US highlights of the selection include Robert Eggers’ The Northman, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s SXSW stunner Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the Nic Cage SXSW slam dunk The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, all presented now as Finnish premieres. The lineup also features two eagerly-awaited North American productions with particular ties to Finland. Riley Stearns’ pitch-black sci-fi satire Dual, a US-Finnish coproduction starring Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul, was shot entirely in Finland. What Josiah Saw, a particularly powerful tour de force of southern gothic comes from Vincent Grashaw, an LA-based director with Finnish roots.
The breed of European genre auteurs toying with arthouse aesthetics is represented in the lineup by Fabrice du Welz and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, whose TIFF sensations Inexorable and Earwig are finally receiving their Finnish premieres. New European talent is showcased through the Nordic premiere of Lukas Rinker’s Holy Shit!, a mind-blowing high concept thriller from Germany, and Cop Secret, a satirical tribute to the Don Simpson era action filmmaking and buddy cop movies coming from Hannes Thor Halldorsson, formerly known as the goalkeeper hero of Iceland’s national soccer team.
Fresh European views are also dominating the festival’s folk horror section. Lynne Davison’s first feature Mandrake is an atmospheric tale of witchcraft set in contemporary Northern Ireland. Ugis Olte, director of the acclaimed “Laibach goes to North Korea” documentary Liberation Day takes the viewer to the dangerous backwoods of Latvia in his first fictional feature Upurga.
Other anticipated features now taking their very first steps in the international film festival circuit include the Manetti Brothers’ Diabolik, a reimagining of the classic Italian comic book franchise also adapted to the big screen by Mario Bava in 1968, and I Am Toxic director Pablo Pares’ PussyCake, an epic Argentinian manifestation of female emancipation, punk rock, and bloodthirsty aliens, now receiving its European premiere at Night Visions.
The retro section of the festival is aiming its spotlight at Lynn Lowry, the queen of American genre cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s who has also managed to revive her career in a highly impressive manner over the past decade. Lowry’s fascinating career under the direction of the likes of George A. Romero (The Crazies), David Cronenberg (Shivers), Jonathan Demme (Fighting Mad), and Paul Schrader (Cat People) is celebrated in a series of special screenings, and Lowry is arriving at the festival to present them all in person to the Helsinki audiences.
Full festival lineup: http://www.nightvisions.info/wp/en/elokuvat/
Tickets to all festival screenings are available NOW through the festival’s webstore at https://www.nightvisions.info/.
