protean depravity

"We're learning to love the things that we hate", sang New Model Army's Justin Sullivan in the early 90's, and presumably still does so today. While Sullivan condemns politically numbed people, consumerism, and a Huxleyan kind of artificially happy society, this year's Fantasy Filmfest Nights ascribed this phrase a more individual notion and made it this year's focus, it seems like, at least for the few movies I saw. I was a little sick this weekend and still am a bit, so not very ideal, but in between bouts of nausea I could force myself to go see at least the minimum amount I planned on seeing. Family; the sacrifices we make, the things we gain, the boxes we need to fit into, the roles we have to play, the ways we have to bend and warp our ways to fit in, what's good for us, what's at stake for us if we don't comply - all these were themes explored during this year's Nights. Let's take a look at the films.

Barely rested from the last film festival, here I am planing for the next one, the wonderful Fantasy Filmfest Nights  (April 16-19) which impresses with a truly fantastic selection that makes me wish I could see all of the films featured. But the budget is tight, and time isn't endless, so I have to make choices. Although I made my choices generously, I probably still won't be able to see all of the pictures below, especially as I still have to go to work, notably on Saturday. The day is for working but we have nights to watch films and I'll try to fill them with screenings.

I have been spending this last weekend mostly at the Fantasy Filmfest White Nights, and this year is the most movies I have seen during White Nights ever, a personal record! I was thinking that the really good movies were reserved for the Nights section in April and the main festival in September, but, wow, was I wrong... A shout-out to the organizers and the Zoo Palast crew, the festival was amazing as always, and a heart warming highlight in this dark, cold and icy winter. I put the films in the order of my personal delight, ranking from least to most, with the movie at the bottom of the page being my favorite of the festival. It doesn't mean that the lower ranking movies are bad or not worth watching, on the contrary, in this year's White Nights selection there wasn't one movie that wasn't worthwhile, but I will explain for each movie why they didn't make my personal best. The good news is, they all made it into the top ten! I missed two films and saw seven from ...

Let's start the year 2026 with the hope that these empty cinema seats will be the only places to witness horrors and that horror will stay strictly confined to fiction. And the first opportunity to fill those seats will be during the upcoming film season - our first station is the  Fantasy Filmfest White Nights  on January 24 and 25, which is like a mini winter break weekend for horror fans. I usually only watch a couple of films during the White Nights, but this year I feel like 2025 wasn't that great of a year for horror, and I feel somewhat starved for more movies. So I decided to take a leave from Hammett on that Saturday and to watch all the films on the first day, and three films on Sunday. Let's take a look at the trailers and talk about them, in order of their appearance at the FFF.

It is almost the end of the year again, ugh... Almost time for the end of the year post, but not quite. Before we look back at my reading year and choose the best books of the year, let's see what's going on in and around Berlin in terms of events and films. Let's also take a first little peek at the upcoming Fantasy Filmfest White Nights, which, this year, is scheduled for the end of January. But there's a lot going on before and after, so let's see...  First off, next Wednesday, December 10th, 8pm, there's a screening at the Odeon cinema of the horror documentary  Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages . The appealing visuals suggest a quasi-serious, silent movie which uses brief episodes to explore witches. I've got my ticket already and I'm very excited for this! If you always wanted to meet the science fiction author Charles Stross, you can have your chance on Thursday, December 11th at 7.30 pm, because he will be at the  Otherland for a Q&A , seemi...

Another September has come, another Fantasy Filmfest has ended with nothing left behind but the memory of more or less awesome films and a week-long escape into other worlds (and, in my case, with a DVD set of a film I miraculously WON at the FFF! More about it under my review for Sweetness ⬇). I watched twelve feature films in total (I walked out on one of them because it was getting very late and I was worrying I might miss my last train as it was a week day), nineteen short films, of which three were animated and three stop motion. Let's see which ones I saw and my personal winners of this year's Fantasy Filmfest (There is an official winner of the festival you can find on their website  when they are through with every city on their program.)

  The 39th edition of  Fantasy Filmfest is just around the corner (3.9 – 10.9. in Berlin) and if you haven't gotten a festival pass (I know I haven't!) the tickets for the movies will be available from August 22nd, that is next week. So it was about time to draw a roadmap to have an overview of the screenings and weed out those that will be shown regularly while highlighting those I will probably not have a chance to see somewhere else. The reason I didn't get a festival pass is (I know I announced I'd go full program, but changed my mind) that even though the FFF announces on its website that the rows for the pass owners are reserved for them, there are a lot of pass owners who fill empty seats with their backpacks and coats and other stuff, and there's nothing more terrifying for an introvert to walk around the room, ask if the seat is empty and if yes, could they please put their stuff away, (possibly endure a side eye or two) and then sit next to that person yo...

There's a special kind of sadness reserved for the week after a film festival, and I'm going through that right now, post fantasy filmfest. I'm all the more sad because I only saw four movies this spring, although the complete lineup was fantastic and when I sat in my comfy seat at Zoo Palast, I felt that wish in me to just keep sitting and watching more movies, to watch them everyday for three-four days... (It's not that dramatic, they expect you to go out and walk around, eat something between movies and they actively make you stand up, so you don't have to die watching movies.) Let's look at the films I was able to see, not every one of them was amazing, I have to say, but at least one was!

As football legend Sepp Herberger said, "nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel" (after the game is before the game), only it's "after the festival is before the festival" for me, because the next mini film festival, Fantasy Filmfest Nights, is already on the horizon - this year from May 8th until 11th. The tickets can be purchased from April 16th on, and the program has been out for a couple of weeks now! Don't forget that some of these movies will have a theatrical release at a later date, like Clown in the Cornfield, so it might be more economical to differentiate between movies you want to see at the festival and those that can be watched elsewhere - although I've really grown to enjoy the festival-atmosphere at the FFF, so I might as well prefer seeing all movies here. Let's take a look which movies I'm talking about... Full list of festival films can be found here !

The Fantasy Filmfest White Nights, a mini-festival which took place this past weekend, was both a lovely launch of Film February as well as a warm-up for the upcoming Berlinale (February 13-23) followed by the Final Girls Berlin Filmfest (March 5-9). So as to not exhaust myself and my finances early on, I only did two films per day, totaling four films; Above the Knee , Presence , MadS and Street Trash - I liked them all, although I have little critiques, comments and opinions I want to dump here. It is noteworthy that three out of four (horror) films I saw rely on narrative or technical methods that are experimental in nature. Now of course, I'm referring to my personal selection and not the entirety of the festival, and I may have been unconsciously drawn towards a certain kind of film, but I can assure that it wasn't apparent in their description, at least not necessarily for all of them. The thing is, it's awesome that more and more filmmakers dare breaking through the...

The German word "Vorfreude" which describes the happiness you feel before something, a "joyful anticipation" according to internet dictionaries, should be a word in every single language on this world for me to express the joy I yearly feel between New Year's Eve and the month of February when all my favorite film festivals and showings takes place. The constellation of those festivals is somewhat different in 2025, with the Fantasy Filmfest White Nights taking place as late as the first weekend of February and the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival even in March! Even with this shift, it's all fine by me, I have been blissfully busy in my joyful anticipation and putting bookmarks on films I want to see and buying tickets where I can.

Since its emergence in the early 70s, the rape-revenge trope has become a staple of horror fiction equally hailed as loathed. A painfully necessary and yet controversial evil to tap the full cathartic potential of the genre, it usually relies on exploitation, provocation, transgression, shock-value and preferably lots of gore, over the top and graphic sexual violence, and bad taste in order to point at a specific social ill . Critics rail at a certain kind of voyeurism as well as instrumentalizing, making light of, and even glorifying of sexual violence against women while others, such as Australian scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, call for film-specific interpretations. Although meant as a negative opinion on the subgenre, instrumentalizing or exploiting a subject in art, no matter how hideous, traumatic, and real it is for its survivors in real life, are valid and effective ways of handling that subject and should be seen in an objective light. All the more in the case of the l...

And here I go with the second part of my favorite FFF movies of this year's 38th edition. While writing these I realized that I watched and really enjoyed a lot of French and French language movies this past week. Having studied and spoken French for my whole life, but not being able to connect with the country per se, I actually miss French, just not the French, lol. I also enjoyed watching light-hearted movies and laughed a lot during this festival. Here are some more reviews, some funny, some serious.

Another September, another Fantasy Filmfest. And it has already ended, damn! As I mentioned before, I didn't find the lineup as a whole unanimously interesting, but a few picks ended up being partly OK, partly great for me, so let's take a look at them. There may be mild spoilers in what I discuss here, but I'll never give away the punchline of the respective films.

Ah yes, time to make movie plans again while gods laugh at me. Especially this year I have felt their filmic wrath upon me, more than ever. While it was the flu that knocked me off my socks in February, it is currently the concussion I have had since the beginning of July because of a shelf full of books falling on my head that I have had some problems ever since, like bad concentration, tiredness and not really being able to watch cinema due to eye problems. It is getting gradually better, and the chances are more than good I'll fully recover but it has intervened with my reading and movies. For other people this may be a minor inconvenience but books and movies are basically what I live for, so I also feel depressed ever since, since I also missed most of my planned visits to open air cinemas. I still have some time for that, if the weather plays along. Last week I caught the last GDR movie that was shown at the Freiluftbühne Weißensee, Jadup und Boel (1988), and it was unproble...

OK, everybody, I'm finally back at blogging and in the aftermath of The Fantasy Filmfest Nights, I have lots and lots of movies to talk about. First off - thank you Fantasy Filmfest, thank you so much, as I have missed almost all Berlinale in February this year due to illness and as a film freak I genuinely felt depression and the lack of my yearly filmic overdose weighed upon me. But you gave me back my light this past weekend. So, thank you!

So maybe this year gives me a brand-new second chance, an opportunity just like I have been wanting, having missed a big part of my beloved Berlinale due to sickness. I was really thrilled to see that there's a four day mini-fest, The Fantasy Filmfest Nights, taking place in April and their selection is perfect! A mixture of very international horror, action and humor, including one feature I painfully had to miss in February, awaits its audience at the beautiful Zoo Palast in spring. I decided to go full program this time to make up for the Berlinale debacle and pamper myself, but there's still some flicks I'm more enthusiastic about than others. Here they are! 

  While the Fantasy Filmfest White Nights are still on at this very moment I am writing this blog post, and I would actually really like to be there and watch the last two films in the program, I feel like with three movies in two days I am all set and done with the White Nights for this year, but up and ready for the upcoming film festivals.

It has totally slipped my mind that the Fantasy Filmfest takes place twice a year (kind of - the second part called White Nights is much shorter than the main festival and a mere weekend long) and the second part, or depending from where you look the first part, takes place this weekend, January 27 and 28. I can't say I'm excited about the whole program, and since I was negligent some shows are unfortunately already sold out. But I'll se what I can do to still grab some tickets.