Only two more months until Halloween…so two more months until Imagine Film Festival 2024! We hope you’ve already marked October 24th – November 3rd blood red in your calendars. In anticipation of all the weird and wonderful things we’re cooking up for this very special 40th Anniversary edition of our genre party, here’s a first look at this year’s themes, artwork and highlights.
40 years of Imagine
Imagine is turning forty this year! Who would have imagined that during the first Weekend of Terror in 1984? Not us! Come celebrate four decades of fantastic film in the Netherlands, as we time travel from those first terrific, terrifying weekends through to the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival-era and on to the genre-bending festival we are now. We’re organising a few festive events for our birthday, including a nostalgic film screening and a Weekend of Terror quiz for our die-hard fans. We will be adding more information on the website soon.
Theme: 1984 Re:Imagined
Besides the first Weekend of Terror, another pretty big deal in 1984 was the fact that the world – thankfully – didn’t quite look like the dystopian nightmare predicted by George Orwell in his literary classic 1984, which was published in 1949. In celebration of the book’s 75th anniversary, and because so many of Orwell’s themes are still relevant today, we’ve decided to draw from1984 for this year’s central festival theme, 1984 Re:Imagined. By ‘reimagining’ 1984 in 2024, we, like Orwell, want to focus on urgent matters of today, but also give the stage to a multitude of contemporary storytellers speculating about possible responses to dystopian future scenarios. We will be seizing the future through the lens of the past, and we want you to think along!
1984 (Michael Radford, 1984)
Titles in the 1984 Re:Imagined programme include dystopian classics like Michael Radfords 1984 adaptation (but of course), Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller The Conversation, notorious German cult film Decoder (best soundtrack ever!) and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as newer titles such as Spanish AI-sci-fi Artificial Justice. Also on the list: a very special live concert screening of Algol: The Tragedy of Power, which already tried to warn us way back in 1920.
Keep an ever-watchful eye on our website and socials for updates on (the rest of) the programme.
Festival poster and artwork
This year’s dystopian festival poster, created by Emir Ayouni at Growcase, Sweden, was inspired by 1984, They Live! and V for Vendetta, with elements of Amsterdam thrown in. We love it and hope you do too!
Guest of Honour: Phil Tippett
We are so, so happy to announce this year’s Guest of Honour: amazing director / animator / visual effects wizard Phil Tippett! Tippett will be receiving a well-deserved Career Achievement Award at Imagine, and he will be joining us on stage for a Career Talk about his decades of work on films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which also came out in 1984!), Star Wars and Jurassic Park. We will also be diving into Tippett’s biggest inspirations and his own contributions to fantastic cinema with screenings of stop motion classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers – which Tippett created the arachnids for – as well as his own masterpiece Mad God. A documentary about him – Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters – will also be shown.
Phil Tippett
Djinn in Islamic horror cinema
As part of our yearly focus Myths of the World, this festival edition will be looking at the many mythical manifestations of the figure of the Djinn in Islamic horror films. Starting from Turkish Djinn titles such as Dabbe: The Possession and Hüddam 4: Ahmer, the representation of the Djinn in films from Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia will be further explored in titles like Hwjn, Three and Sakaratul Maut. Next to these screenings, which will be accompanied by Djinn storytelling by Mezrab, the programme includes a lecture by Turkish Djinn horror specialist Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar.
Hwjn (Yasir Alyasiri, 2023)
Other guests
Besides Phil Tippett, many other guests will be coming to Imagine 2024, including Turkish filmmakers Can Evrenol and Utku Uçar and director Miguel Llansó (Crumbs), whose new sci-fi Infinite Summer is screening in the main programme.
Infinite Summer (Miguel Llansó, 2024)
Main programme titles
Speaking of that main programme… here’s a few first titles for you to get excited about. We’ve got identity switchery and mind fuckery in Aaron Schimberg’s festival hit A Different Man; Kim Tae-gon’s thrilling disaster movie Project Silence; feminist coming-of-age horror Animale; The Devil’s Bath, the latest nightmare from Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy); Bruno Dumont’s Star Wars-parody The Empire; terrifying Mexican horror film Párvulos; and a 4K restoration of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.
More information and titles will be added to our website and social media soon. See you in October!
Project Silence (Kim Tae-gon, 2023)
