If you missed out on seeing films at this year’s festival here’s a chance to catch up with them at other venues. LA ANTENA opens May 16 at selected cinemas around London and the UK, including the ICA. CHEMICAL WEDDING will be showing at the Apollo West End from May 30. And the BFI Southbank is having an anime season showing all of the films screened at the allnighter, plus Paprika and The Place Promised in our Early Days (shown last year) along with Mikoto Shinkai’s latest 5 Centimetres per Second followed by a Q&A with the director. Full details here.
And if you didn’t get to see the exclusive DARK KNIGHT trailer that The Joker had vandalised, you can see the unscratched one here.
LA ANTENA
Described as Fritz Lang meets Tim Burton, this dazzling black and white silent movie manages to exhibit a fresh imagination all of its own.
The boy with no eyes, whose mother has no face, lives in an unnamed city where the population have no voices. Their voices were stolen by the evil media mogul, Mr TV. He has the populous hooked on TV dinners and broadcasts featuring a mysterious and uniquely ‘vocal’ female known only as The Voice. Mr TV has further plans for the city without a voice and only a young girl, her father and the blind boy stand in his way.
La Antena brilliantly blends live action and animation to create a beautiful expressionist vision which pays respectful homage to the early days of cinema whilst also having great fun with its conventions. Such silent film staples as wondrous machinery, evil henchmen and a blonde heroine are all present here whilst the onscreen captions take on a life of their own in a series of playful and ingenious jokes. Director Esteban Sapir’s screenplay conveys an intelligent message about the power of the media to hypnotise and suppress the masses; a warning all too pertinent when it comes to the history of his home country, Argentina.
This is a lavish, cinematic fairy tale which exists on the border between the magical and the downright strange.