The genre entry is Dave Made a Maze, and indie fantasy which has been quietly winning awards at film festivals for a while now. I suspect it won’t be getting a lot of screens across the country, so you may have to hunt for it if you want to see it. The Hitman’s Bodyguard isn’t genre (beyond the fact that it looks like it is straight out of a comic book), but it does look like it will be silly fun. Decisions, decisions…
Today is the first day of the 17th Annual SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival, with a host of amazing films, including 7 world film premieres, 13 UK film premieres, and SCI-FIDO, the world’s only cosplay for dogs! It runs for 10 days total and includes goodies like the movie Virtual Revolution and this year’s assortment of Sci-Fi Games. Wish I could be there this time!
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China has finally launched a film festival specifically targeting the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres, called the Just Film Festival. The group appears to have organized in 2014, holding the first festival in 2015, as near as I can tell. It seems to have gotten them off to a good start, because this year around 200 industry professionals were running 3 tracks, with the most popular session being the projects, promotion, and investment presentation. That started off with around 500 potential films putting in their bids for funding, and by the time the dust settled it was narrowed down to just 3 titles: Immerse, Saving Human, and Planet X. I don’t know which or how many of them got the money to begin production, but over the last decade or two there has been an explosive growth in the Chinese Science Fiction literary scene. Some of those books and stories have won recognition world wide, and some of them are now in bookstores in North America; it is nice to see their SF/F film industry starting to get some momentum and recognition as well.
The UK film The Lobster has been touring the film festival circuit, picking up 14 awards so far, and is now getting a limited theatrical release. Single people are locked into a hotel and given 45 days to form a romantic relationship; those that don’t manage to do that are converted into animals and released in the woods. While it sounds interesting, I missed seeing Captain America: Civil War this weekend because I was sick, I will have to do that film before I see anything else.
This is the trailer for NYC ACM SIGGRAPH’s annual college computer animation festival, MetroCAF. This year it happens on Friday, September 25, 2015 at 7:00PM at the New York Institute of Technology’s Auditorium On Broadway. It looks like they have quite a few tasty animations to show this time around, so if you are close enough to make the presentation I recommend you do your best to attend.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 is the next gathering place for what started out as the USENET NEWSGROUP Special Interest Group: GRAPHics, taking place November 2nd to the 5th in Kobe, Japan. One of the highlights of every such gathering is their Computer Animation Festival Trailer, giving you a taste of what many of the best minds of the business are working on. It looks like they have some real goodies this time around; enjoy.