Roaring towards your 23third version, the Neuchatel Intl. Implausible Movie Pageant (NIFFF) built its popularity as a haven for extravagant fare, attracting a reliably young (and renewable) audience anticipating wild thrills and hard-to-find Asian titles, while becoming a fixture on the horror contest circuit as a house away from home by the lake for a group of returning filmmakers a year or more.
Over the past half decade or so, the Swiss show has also expanded, welcoming new faces and countless voices into the mix, all while combining a more expansive view of fantasy with intersectional programming that explores sociological questions through style – or, if you prefer, that sees in fantasy a more crystalline reflection of the wider world.
“Fantasy is the cinema of the margins, the cinema of the forbidden”, says NIFFF director, Pierre-Yves Walder. “It’s the tool that underrepresented or minority communities use to tell their own stories, and so I see it as part of our mission to share films that may not be seen as much elsewhere. Across world cinema, filmmaking style is evolving.”
Running from July 5th to 13th, this year’s version will show 124 films distributed across six sections covering five continents and 46 countries. The contest will open with “Animale” by Emma Benestan, an atmospheric, slow-moving young bullfighter transforming into his prey. Led by rising star Oulaya Amamra, this year’s contest opener shares some key similarities with last year’s NIFFF winner, Amanda Nell Eu’s “Tiger Stripes.”
Both films arrived at Neuchatel after leaving Cannes – a timely path that the festival itself and its alumni played an outsized role in achieving. And both films combine body horror and animal transformation with female coming-of-age narratives, a trend Walder sees echoed in many of the titles showing this year.
“Jakt”
NIFFF
Certainly, says the director of NIFFF Selection that feminist and environmentally conscious narratives predominate in this year’s selection, informing competing entries such as “The Satan’s Tub” by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, “Mi Bestia” by Camila Beltrán, and “Ennennum” by Shalini Ushadev. Meanwhile, the contest’s Third Kind highlight – a piece dedicated to films that cross the lines between genres and codes – features titles such as Rose Glass’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” Caroline Lindy’s “Your Monster” and Sarah’s “Jakt.” Gyllenstierna – a film that deftly weaves the two themes together as it follows a band of macho hunters left to their own devices after the animals they pursue disappear.
“We don’t intend to impose a message,” explains Walder. “We don’t go out looking for titles directed by women or programming films that deal with environmental themes. But we are clearly delicate and receptive to such proposals, and in an area that has always had masculine tendencies, this new wealth of feminine visions is a statement of value.”
The fact that many of the titles prepared for this year’s NIFFF were marked before the end of the contest speaks of a broader ecosystem finally reaching the values that have long animated the Swiss showcase.
To wit, when Walder took the reins in 2022, he marked the event with a retrospective dedicated to queer illustration, after which he adopted that with a focus on female Scream Queen archetypes for his sophomore outing. Those two strands — along with a millennial bent that informs every Walder and much of his programming team — now meet in Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Noticed the TV Glow,” an A24-backed fantasy about style fandom that exactly dramatizes so many questions that Walder and his team have previously explored.
“It seemed obvious to open the sector and program these types of films,” says Walder. “It has a queer sensibility and an air of adolescent melancholy that is highly evocative”
“I noticed the glow of the TV”
ANYTHING
With fantasy fare now the cornerstone of sales brokers’ catalogs and with guts-and-glory horror films winning big prizes at the world’s biggest festivals, style filmmakers can benefit from a level of market risk eclipsed only by competition between festivals to capture the most popular titles. But Walder takes great comfort in this new dynamic play space.
“Seeing different festivals giving new prominence to fantasy and style is a huge pleasure,” he says. “And it pushes us to assume the opposite, to seek out different proposals and to be freer in our programming. We don’t have to stick to a really codified fashion; we’ll show whatever we want, as long as the films are available. It multiplies the odds.”
To see such potential in action, just look at the latest NIFFF program dedicated to short films by Swiss students, supervised by Charlotte Serrand – the creative director of the most generalist French film competition La Roche-Sur-Yon, and the most new addition to Neuchatel. programming team. And on a deeper level, this new prominence feels like a byproduct of the pageant’s personal actions in the territory over the past twenty years.
“These students grew up with more access to fantasy films,” says Walder. “So we’ve seen a democratization of style codes, because shorts allow for that kind of fun. The risks are lower, which gives these young talents greater freedom. And many of them used that freedom to play with those instruments that now make fantasy cinema so rich and varied.”
“Everyone in the creative world is very excited about this type of cinema,” he adds. “Charlotte above all. We saw the more generalist auteur cinema opening up, borrowing more and codes, and this fully characterizes the guiding vision of our show. Once again, style cinema is evolving.”
“She valued flowers more”
NIFFF