IMAGINE: Fantastic Film Festival – A feast for the senses and lots of food for thought

IMAGINE: Fantastic Film Festival – A feast for the senses and lots of food for thought

<Suspend your disbelief>, fellow earthlings, and let’s… imagine! With Fantastic Alchemy as its central theme, Amsterdam’s <Imagine Fantastic Film Festival> has provided an awesome, mind-boggling feast for the senses between October 25th and November 4th at the <FilmHallen> and <LAB111>.

The films screened were obviously focused on the phantasy genre, but also on science fiction, horror and the <new facets of Iranian films with female protagonists at The Unveiled Revolt exhibition>. In each edition, there’s a Myths of the World special feature dedicated to film production dealing with a specific mythology – after Indonesia and Hong Kong in previous editions, in 2023 Persian myths (and the condition of women in Iran) were approached throught this magnificent selection of films:

180º Rule – Farnoosh Samadi – Iran, 2020
Chess of the Wind – Mahammad Reza Aslani – Iran 1976
Subtraction – Mani Haghighi – Iran 2022
Under the Shadow – Babak Anvari – UK, Jordan, Qatar, Iran 2016

Imagine has also provided us with Virtual Reality experiences with the screening of important VR-themed films such as Brainstorm (D. Trumbull), Lawnmower Man (B. Leonard), Nirvana (G. Salvatores) and Strange Days (K. Bigelow), and also the full immersive experience in VR-cinema through 7 digital artworks.

This festival, with a history spanning 38 years, also grants the following <prizes>: the Silver Scream Award for the best film according to popular polls – in 2023, the winner was The Boy and The Heron (Hayao Miyazaki); the Mèlies d’Argent for best feature film, won by Vermin (Sébastien Vanicek), and short film, won by A Kind of Testament (Stephen Vuillemin); and the Sea Devil Award, the Jury prize, awarded to Tiger Stripes (Amanda Nell Eu).

I truly loved this festival and feel intense gratitude for everybody who worked to make it happen. “Fantastic fiction can be a lovely form of escapism”, Imagine states, “but more often than that it triggers reflection; showing other or future worlds also encourage us to think about our own world”. I couldn’t agree more.

These days I’ve been trippin’ with these films were extremely relevant to the purposes of my on-going PhD research on Philosophy of Art (UFG/UvA), providing vast food for thought about the intersections of speculative fiction and our current predicament in the Anthropocene epoch. Thanks also for meaningful interactions and talks with the curators and organizers Stanislwa Liguzinski and Eddie Appels, whose remarks and insights also made a lot of difference in providing even more food for thought.

Eduardo Carli de Moraes

Amsterdam, November 11th 2023