The Final Girls Film Festival Edition 11 is over...
The post-festival blues still lingering, here I am with a massive back pain the one week of sitting in City Kino Wedding bestowed me, thinking back of the awesome time I had.
Being in the jury and contributing to determine the winner amongst the feature movies, all the great people I met, chatted, watched movies with, discussed those movies and connected... It would be no exaggeration to say I had the time of my life, and even though I didn't cry, I certainly understand fellow jury members who were hit hard by the melancholy.
On the picture you see is all that's left from the good days: a lot of stickers and business cards, flyers for the Leiden B-Movie Festival in August, the festival program in which we're all featured, a tote bag, my name tag, and one piece of print art I bought from Henna Räsänen who was sitting at the table next to us, the Otherland table, during vendor day on Sunday.
Let us first start with the short film reviews as usual, these little bonbons of creep and horror. This year, the shorts were divided into whopping eleven categories: Ambition, Eco-Horror, Psychosexual Horror, Social Horror, Midnight, Folk Horror, Queer Horror, Nightmares, Body Horror, Religious Horror, and Friendship. I'm shortly pitching my highlights from each short block in the following, and then going on with the other festival stuff.
Let's go!
Ambition
Drosera (Directed by Maud Carpentier &
Boris Tilquin, Belgium, 2025)
Ambitious teenage motocross
racer Alice is violently attacked and assaulted by a group of fellow
bikers, but then brought back to life by a carnivorous plant. While
she finds herself trying to cope with the aftereffects of what
happened to her, and doesn't feel supported by anyone, she also
discovers she now has super powers which can help her.
Every
feature or short film revolving around survivors of sexual assault is
valuable, important and relevant, especially those survivors as young
as Alice, and have to experience for the first time the disgusting
ways the world reacts to the subjects of this kind of violence. This
short film won the jury award and deservedly so!
Eco-Horror
Waste (Written, directed and produced
by Paola Teran, Peru, 2025)
I haven't watched this short film
in City Kino Wedding, but online at home, so I didn't see the full
range of these films (the cinema screenings have a couple of more films than the ones you can stream online), but I ended up intrigued by
especially this Peruvian gem. In a dystopia, a hostile, foggy city,
lives a woman in constant fear of a presence in her wardrobe. A voice
guides her to the sea where she meets her “other self” and thus
has the chance to live the life she always wanted to live. She
becomes part of a strange TV show while the world outside is as
hostile as ever.
To watch this film was a very very jarring experience as the gray-ness, the sounds, the camera angles, the dirty, foggy, blood-smeared environment - in short, everything about this universe stresses the person watching. As a good dystopia should. I can't claim that I understood everything about it, but this short certainly did leave an impression.
Psychosexual
Martarella (Directed by MB Montes, Spain, 2024)
Martarella is
in a long-distance relationship in the truest sense of the word; her
boyfriend is an astronaut in space. Luckily they have a super device
with which he can give her pleasure while playing an annoying tune.
Still, it's not very fun living with a sort of reverse chastity belt
controlled by a man in space, is it?
Every film about bodily autonomy of women is important, especially
in our times, so bring them on!
Social Horror
It's no coincidence that the saying that is the title of this short film, "Tokum ama yerim" comes from Turkey, where you are often offered food as soon as you enter somewhere with the question "Are you hungry?" Food is usually so good, you eat it regardless you're hungry or not, thus the saying. Like these five women on their "gold day" (altın günü) tea party, who eat and eat and eat and can't stop, all the while making hurtful comments about the host's daughter and her weight. And it escalates.
This was very sweet and entertaining, extra kudos to the end song Şişman Olmayı Seviyorum by Emaskülatör.
PÁLPITO / Hunch (Directed by Marisa Crespo & Moisés Romera,
Spain 2025)
While unintentionally touching one of her client's
husband's hand, a tarot reader gets a vision and a premonition that
something terrible will happen. She follows the feeling and
becomes obsessed, following him everywhere first, and then waiting at the restaurant that she just knows the bad thing will happen. And it
does. And it's bad.
Take Care (Directed by Brittany Ashley, United States, 2025)
So while the very first short film I mentioned above won the best short film of this year, there is always also an honorary mention for short films too, and this one got that special mention.
Midnight
Beauty Sleep (Written and directed
by Jasmine Emma De Silva, UK, 2024)
A quite dystopic work, in
which cosmetic surgery takes extreme dimensions - right now, all the
rage is getting beauty treatments at a mortician where you can be
sedated and have body parts sewn unto your own body, even lie in a
coffin. Our beautician is being micromanaged by her boss, and is
annoyed, but suddenly a catastrophe makes her realize she has the one
in a lifetime chance of letting her creativity talk without restraints. And
the result is grotesquely glorious.
Lok (Directed by Mahmuda Sultana Rima,
Bangladesh, 2025)
The reclusive village "witch" is
of course the one accused when men start disappearing. And maybe she
really did it. But why, and how?
Although very short, even for a short format, Lok is hypnotic, sinister, and sickly sweet all at once. The score was great too, and the combination of all the above made me watch this on a loop.
Queer Horror
Bloody Larry (Directed by Jillian Cantwell, USA, 2025)
Beware,
because there's a new villain in town - the gay serial-killer urban
legend Bloody Larry! Two friends try to call on him through a dating app… Gory fun,
harhar.
Nightmares
Night Hags (Written and directed by Kiley Evans Mahoney)
A very heartbreaking, but in the end, satisfying short film about rape revenge with supernatural help.
Body Horror
Femme (Directed by Nina Noël Raaijmakers, The Netherlands,
2025)
Although some scenes were very uncomfortable to watch,
this is a movie that touches upon what can go wrong, and
usually does for girls, in those first days of discovering sex, and does so in a very genuine way. I
love the message and the bitter-sweet ending.
¡Abre las piernas! / Spread Your Legs (Written and directed by Águeda V. Flores, Spain/Mexico/Switzerland, 2025)
Who of us doesn't feel frustrated by man gynecologists at some point? I personally will only ever go to women doctors but Paula, a martial arts performer, isn't being given that choice when the clinic changes her usual doctor short term. She lets the creepy and insensitive doctor do his work, but he deserves the kick that's coming his way...
Religious Horror
Pickled Rabbit (Directed by Julie Zhu, Canada)
I love how the colors work in this short film about a woman who is desperate for her sick mother to express her love for her and delivers her to a remedial cult with her own hands.
Friendship
Blood Sisters (Directed by Muraya Moore, Australia, 2025)
Luckily I never had friends that invited me to sleepovers only to torment me or test me in some way, but Summer is not that fortunate. At a sleepover as strange as adorable in some weird way, she is asked to bring a sacrifice, an outrageous one if you ask me, for their group's totem and even more outrageously she agrees (passes the test). She fits in well, though.
These were the short films that stood out for me. Because there were a lot of categories I tried to limit my highlights to one per block, since there's still the feature section to come...
It was really an amazing experience to be in this year's feature jury alongside Dani van Duin from the Leiden B-Movie Festival and Inga Weber from the Freilichtbühne Weißensee. The feature movies competing were: The Virgin of the Quarry Lake by Laura Casabe; HoneyBunch by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli; Camp by Avalon Fast; Fréwaka by Aislinn Clarke; Mother of Flies by Toby Poser, Zelda Adams and John Adams; Dead Lover by Grace Glowicki; Queens of the Dead by Tina Romero and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You by Mary Bronstein.
The winner of this year's 11th Edition of the Final Girls Film Festival is Mother of Flies, and the honorary mention went to Dead Lover.
Let's quickly run through the movies together;
Honey Bunch is a SF-mystery in neo-Gothic style, following a husband who brings his wife to a rehabilitation home, a remote mansion in the woods with a gorgeous labyrinth-garden, and her experiencing weird things, seeing people in the night, feeling off generally. The incidences lead to a quite unexpected end, a creepy one. The movie imitates in visuals, Gothic elements, and camera tricks (like the quick zoom-in of a certain character) a 70s horror/thriller style you will recognize from giant titles like The Omen or Don't Look Now. I quite enjoyed this one and it was among my favorites.
Camp follows a young girl who is submitted to "the camp" after a nervous breakdown after the death of her best friend. She does need a lot of time and introspection for a feeling of grief and longing of which she will possibly never get rid of, but the community she is able to join at the camp makes it definitely easier for her. A super atmospheric, slow-paced coming of age story that enchants with colors, mesmerizing visuals, and score.
Awesome highlight: Director and lead Toby Poser was at the festival, so that we had the chance to meet and chat a little bit with this through and through interesting and amazing person. The film draws from her and her husband and co-director John Adams' experience of both having gone through cancer which naturally affected their view on life. We in the jury are firmly convinced that the award found the right person, the right movie.
Dead Lover feels like a crazy school play and we agreed there were so many crazy sex and love scenes, but so original, so far from the male gaze that it felt incredibly refreshing and just so likable, so comfortable. This is definitely one of the most original films I EVER saw and that comes with a high recommendation.
Queens of the Dead is a movie made by the daughter of the King of the Dead: Tina Romero, daughter of iconic filmmaker George R. Romero. Sadly, this is basically the one gimmick Queens of the Dead relies upon and unfortunately it becomes tiresome on the long run, as well as the jokes based on Father Romero's Night of the Living Dead (They're coming to get you Barbara, etc.) I personally found the movie a little predictable and was a little disappointed, but there were disagreements on this in our jury discussion.
Finally, If I Had Legs I Would Kick You, which is an A24 production (compared to the other films in the competition this feels almost like Hollywood) and bears the signature A24 style; absolutely beautiful visuals, slow pace, socially relevant content, as we follow a woman, who in her life as a mother of a girl with a feeding disorder, as a wife to a captain who is never there, and as an overloaded psychotherapist is completely overstressed and overwhelmed. The cherry on top comes in the shape of a hole in their apartment's ceiling which forces her and her daughter to move into a shabby motel. Here, she finds some release in going for walks at night smoking weed, drinking wine, eating junk food and listening to music.
Well those were the movies, but I also watched a musical performance, namely the Live Score to The Seashell and the Clergyman and Meshes of the Afternoon (click on the titles to see full short films) performed by the horror prog trio Pavone Cristallo. It was delightful! I want to visit more of these live shows, plus I didn't know these classic short films at all, so it was an all around win for me.
The last day of the festival, Sunday, which was also the vendor day, was full of coming and going between jury duties and the Otherland book table, but it was double the fun, really. I love selling books to the horror crowd, always have, and I loved being on the jury.
So, my friends, I'm now retreating into the darkness of the post-festival sadness, but not for long - our fourth and last station of film season lies ahead: the next Fantasy Filmfest Nights in April. There are some movies in their lineup already, and you will never guess, I saw a surprise name that made me scream of joy, stay tuned for more!
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