Based upon the slick visuals and chillingly deft touch in building the suspense in his Sundance 2021 hit Coming Home in the Dark, it was announced in June that director James Ashcroft would helm Legendary Pictures’ prestige horror property, Devolution. An adatation of the blockbuster bestseller Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by World War Z author Max Brooks, it represents a high-profile Hollywood debut for the New Zealand-born filmmaker and his writing partner, Eli Kent.
While on the promotional circuit for Coming Home in the Dark in late 2021, Ashcroft offered up some insight into how the project was developing. Full disclosure - your correspondent is a Sasquatch obsessive and Brooks' book, which chronicles a Bigfoot pack attack deep in America’s forested heartland, was the literary highpoint of 2020.
“Unlike you, I never had a lot of interest in anything Sasquatch, certainly wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Sasquatch lore” Ashcroft laughs, speaking via Zoom from his Wellington home, “but now I am utterly obsessed and fascinated by all things Sasquatch! I am only just getting into this magnificent world of Bigfoot and his cousins across the world.” (Pictured, right: Ashcroft, on the set of Coming Home in the Dark)
He quickly points out that, like most great horror tales, there is meaning in the monster’s presence. “Max has written a story that the Sasquatch are only a part of, a mirror to what the story is really about,” he explains. Brooks’ narrative focuses on the small, isolated community of Greenloop, an eco-centric commune who suddenly are cut off from the rest of the world after a volcanic eruption. In addition to lacking outdoor survival skills and resources, they soon find themselves the focus of a group of hungry, desperate, highly intelligent Sasquatch.
“This is a story of human arrogance and hubris, that assumption that we can go into someone else’s house and do as we wish,” says Ashcroft. “When that tenuous link to civilization is cut, what happens to us then? Then there’s the human drama of watching this eco-community implode, a group of people that then has to deal with the environment’s apex predator, the Sasquatch.”
Brooks’ novel was critically acclaimed upon release and spent several weeks on US bestseller lists. While acknowledging its B-monster movie premise was part of the fun, literary critic for The Gaurdian U.K., Neil McRobert, also pointed out that Brooks’ novel made for a challenging read in the time of COVID. “The true terror for a post-pandemic reader,” he said in his June 2020 review, “is in the grounded reality of how victims of disaster can be overlooked and how thin the veneer of civility and technology is revealed to be in the face of grand social disruption.”
The big-screen adaptation means the project is coming full-circle from its origins. Brooks had first planned to write a screenplay and successfully pitched to Legendary. But soon the project cooled and slipped out of development until Brooks re-approached Legendary founder Thomas Tull for the novel rights. (Pictured, above: Max Brooks)
No casting or production start date has been announced yet, but Ashcroft and Kent are moving quickly through the screenplay drafts. “I’m really loving it! It’s a really wild ride,” says Ashcroft. “We are thinking of it as sort of The Poseidon Adventure, meets a more adult Jurassic Park, meets Straw Dogs.”
Beniamino Cantena’s debut feature VERA DE VERDAD and hometown favourite Jonathan Adam’s charming short DAILY DRIVER have taken Best Film honours in their respective categories in The 2021 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, held Sunday at the Actors Centre Australia.
The films led an eclectic roster of winners selected from the 21 features and 78 short films made eligible as part of the festival's first ever foray into ‘hybrid programming’. The 4-day live event wrapped Sunday 14th, while the online program will run via the Xerb streaming platform until Thursday 25th.
An Italian/Chilean co-production that comes to Sydney via festival placements in Torino, Trieste, Brussels and Chuncheon, Vera De Verdad tells a deeply moving story of soul transference and shared destiny and stars Marcelo Alonso and Maria Gastini, both nominated in their respective lead acting categories. (Pictured, right: Vera de Verdad director, Beniamino Cantena)
The Best Film category is named in honour of the late production designer Ron Cobb, whose conceptual artistry is central to the iconic status of such works as Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian, Alien, Aliens, The Abyss, Total Recall and the TV series Firefly. Cobb married an Australian woman and lived in Sydney from the 1970s until his passing in September, 2020.
Other feature film winners included Ben Tedesco, crowned Best Actor for his self-directed performance in the lockdown time-loop drama NO TOMORROW; Peruvian actress Haydeé Cáceres for her wordless but wondrous lead turn in Aldo Salvini’s MOON HEART; and, exciting multi-hyphenate Carlson Young for her unique vision as director of the festival’s Opening Night film, THE BLAZING WORLD (pictured, left).
Also in contention for Director and Actor trophies, Daily Driver took top short film honours but ceded other categories to U.K. filmmaker Ryan Andrews (Best Director for HIRAETH) and French leading man Denis Hubleur (Best Actor for CAUSA SUI). Melbourne-based Jessica Tanner earned Best Actress for her blistering turn as the shell-shocked victim of cyclical domestic abuse in Andrew Jaksch’s controversy-courting drama TODAY.
The Audience Award winners were Eddie Arya’s RISEN, an ambitious alien invasion epic that filmed in Sydney and Canada over a four year period, and Spanish effects master Jorge Corpi’s CGI short-film thrill-ride, ELLIPSIS.
Sydney’s leading festival for cult and underground cinematic misadventures, the Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF), returns with a packed virtual program in 2021, celebrating its milestone 15th year.
With lockdown restrictions in Sydney affecting in-the-flesh desires for SUFF 2021, festival organisers made the call to stream its full program on-demand to fans of alternative culture across Australia and the world from Thursday 9th September to Sunday 26th September.
The 2021 line-up features 30 feature films and documentaries, 20 Australian premieres, a special 40-year anniversary film, and over 100 shorts representing filmmakers from Australia, the USA, the UK, France, Norway, Canada, Finland, Denmark, India, Japan, and the Russian Federation.
Katherine Berger, Festival Director said, “At a time when there is so much uncertainty, we couldn’t bear to postpone or cancel SUFF in 2021. We owe it to so many people that support SUFF and that includes all the filmmakers that have been submitting films to us all throughout the pandemic. It’s been a tough time to host an event and a tough time to be making films, but creative outlets are so important, especially in a time like this.”
Opening Night honours fall to SWEETIE, YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT (pictured, above), from Kazakhstan-based director Yernar Nurgaliyev, a no-holds-barred road trip film about a man who decides to get away from his nagging wife with his friends, befallen by a series of highly entertaining and incomprehensible events.
One of the most anticipated films will be the Australian premiere of THE LAND, a cinematic experiment between photographer Ingvar Kenne, academic Gregory Ferris, and award-winning actors Steve Rodgers and Cameron Stewart. A microbudget, improvised drama, The Land is a bold and confronting story of friendship tested by a very dark secret, filmed over the course of three years.
Sessions reminding us of the importance of community include ALIEN ON STAGE, where an amateur dramatics group create a serious stage adaptation of the sci-fi horror classic and the philosophical documentary CANNON ARM AND THE ARCADE QUEST (pictured, right), in which ‘Cannon Arm’ Kim attempt to be the first in the world to play an arcade machine from the early ‘80s for 100 consecutive hours.
Documentaries with women at the forefront include FANNY: THE RIGHT TO ROCK, revealing the untold story of a Filipina American garage band that morphed into the ferocious rock group Fanny; POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ, in which the death of X-Ray Spex front-woman Poly Styrene (pictured, top) sends her daughter on an intimate journey through her mother's archives; and, indie director Beth B’s LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, the first career-spanning retrospective of New York City’s preeminent No Wave icon of the late 70s.
Australia’s underground sector is repped by Robert Wood’s bloody black-comedy AN IDEAL HOST, where the apocalypse comes to dinner and SWEETHURT, Sydney filmmaker Tom Danger’s intertwining stories of love, friendship, and paralysing regret.
One of the most challenging SUFF titles will undoubtedly be HOTEL POSEIDON, a film reminiscent of Delicatessen, that follows reluctant hotel owner Dave, a man troubled by nightmares, his neighbour and love. And a special 40th anniversary presentation of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE, a visually stunning, perverse adaptation of the classic story, starring Udo Kier (pictured, below), is a major coup for the festival.
This year, SUFF introduces three new shorts selections: a special slate of science fiction shorts in OTHER WORLDS, presented in conjunction with The Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival; a quartet of films about friendship, duty and revenge in LOVABLE IDIOTS; and EXPLODING EYEBALLS, exploring all forms of animation from the experimental to the traditional. A special sidebar is called SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER, a slate of hilarious vintage educational films with live commentary by beloved underground identities, Jay Katz and Miss Death.
This year’s smorgasbord of shorts includes our usual favourite sessions - non-fiction shorts in REALITY BITES; the most disturbing and beautiful love stories in LOVE/SICK; SHIT SCARED, the best cinematic darkness; mind-expanding narratives of LSD FACTORY; the best emergent Australian talent in OZPLOIT!; and WTF!, the films too strange and excessive to go anywhere else in the program.
15th ANNUAL SYDNEY UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL will launch online Thursday 9th September and run Sunday 26th September at www.suff.com.au
The twisted psychology and skewed world view of the serial killer is central to two of the top award winners at the 2021 Festival de Cannes. Julia Ducornau’s Titane, a nightmarish study of a killer impregnated by a car, won the coveted Palme d’Or, with Caleb Landry’s portrayal of Australia’s worst mass murderer in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram earning the Best Actor trophy.
Photo credit: Valerie Hache / AFP
"There is so much beauty and emotion to be found in what cannot be pigeonholed,” said Ducornau, who exploded onto the horror scene in 2016 with her cannibal thriller, Raw. Her latest exploration of body-horror themes and aesthetics has stunned critics on the Croisette. “Thank you to the Jury for calling for more diversity in our film experiences and in our lives,” the French director said, upon receiving her award from actress Sharon Stone, “And thank you to the Jury for letting the monsters in.”
Caleb Landry was not quite so outspoken in accepting his award, presented to him by French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos. Citing nerves and a genuine fear he would have thrown-up if he had tried to speak, he gave no podium speech. (Pictured, right; credit - Christophe Simon / AFP)
Other major winners were Best Director Leos Carax, for the rock-opera romance Annette; Best Actress Renate Reinsve, for Joachim Trier’s stirring drama The Worst Person in the World; and, Best Screenplay recipient Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, for Drive My Car.
It would appear that Jury members steadfastly refused to compromise their opinions with two tied awards announced - the Grand Prix was shared between Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero and Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6, while Nadav Lapid Ahed’s Knee and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria tag-teamed the Jury Prize. (Pictured, left; Julia Ducorna and Sharon Stone; credit - Andreas Rentz / Getty Images)
Wrapping up a vibrant 12-day event that succeeded in recapturing the starpower and spontaneity of great festivals of the past, competition jury head Spike Lee fluffed his duties but couldn’t spoil last night’s award ceremony. Lee inadvertently read out the Palme d’Or winner at the start of the evening and not the end, meaning Ducornau sat wriggling with glee in her seat for the duration of the event, waiting to collect her award.
Best Actress winner Renate Reinsvem, with Lee-Byung-Hun (credit - Andreas Rentz / Getty Images)
The full list of 2021 Festival de Cannes winners:
COMPETITION Palme d’Or: TITANE Grand Prix — TIE: Asghar Farhadi, A HERO AND Juho Kuosmanen’s COMPARTMENT No. 6 Director: Leos Carax, ANNETTE Actor: Caleb Landry Jones, NITRAM Actress: Renate Reinsve, THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD Jury Prize — TIE: Nadav Lapid AHED'S KNEE and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA Screenplay: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, DRIVE MY CAR
OTHER PRIZES Camera d’Or: MURINA, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović Short Films Palme d’Or: ALL THE CROWS IN THE WORLD, Tang Yi Short Films Special Mention: AUGUST SKY, Jasmin Tenucci Golden Eye Documentary Prize: A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, Payal Kapadia Ecumenical Jury Prize: DRIVE MY CAR, Ryusuke Hamaguchi Queer Palm: THE DIVIDE, Catherine Corsini
UN CERTAIN REGARD Un Certain Regard Award: UNCLENCHING THE FIST, Kira Kovalenko Jury Prize: GREAT FREEDOM, Sebastian Meise Prize for Ensemble Performance: BONNE MERE, Hafsia Herzi Prize for Courage: LA CIVIL, Teodora Ana Mihai Prize for Originality: LAMB, Valdimar Johannsson Special Mention: PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN, Tatiana Huezo
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT Europa Cinemas Label: A CHIARA, Jonas Carpignano Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize: MAGNETIC BEATS, Vincent Maël Cardona
CRITICS’ WEEK Nespresso Grand Prize: FEATHERS, Omar El Zohairy Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize: Elie Grappe and Raphaëlle Desplechin, OLGA GAN Foundation Award for Distribution: Elie Grappe and Raphaëlle Desplechin, ZERO FUCKS GIVEN Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award: Sandra Melissa Torres, AMPARO
CINÉFONDATION First Prize: THE SALAMANDER CHILD, Theo Degen Second Prize: SALAMANDER, Yoon Daewoon Third Prize — TIE:LOVE STORIES ON THE MOVE, Carina-Gabriela Dasoveanu and CANTAREIRA, Rodrigo Ribeyro
Guest columnist Anthea van den Bergh is a 'multi-platform journalist', a Melbourne-based freelance voice with a Masters degree in Journalism from the University of Melbourne. In late 2020, she approached several voices in the speculative cinema community (including Screen-Space editor and Festival Director of the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, Simon Foster) to comment on the role that science-fiction narratives might play in a world recovering from the unimaginable. The resulting article makes for a truly compelling appreciation of the role that scifi might play as society moves forward....
In the first two weeks of March last year as the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, one of the most streamed films in the world was Contagion, a science fiction plague film where 26 million people die.
Writers jumped at the opportunity to unpack this phenomenon. In a stunning display of deadpan, Nicole Sperling wrote in The New York Times, “One of the hottest movies in the Warner Bros. library is a nine-year-old drama that kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in its first 15 minutes.”
The film seemed skin crawlingly prophetic in light of the emerging pandemic, filled with all too familiar images of empty airports and offices, people wearing masks, warehouses of sick people, and hysteria over vaccines and supposed cures. But perhaps our fascination with the dystopian thriller tells us more about the human for stories and why we turn to science fiction in times of uncertainty and crisis.
Consider that besides Contagion, sales in plague fiction like Albert Camus’ The Plague went up by 150% worldwide last year, and tripled in France and Italy. Stephen King’s apocalyptic plague novel The Stand also had nearly double the number of online sales.
Scholars, scifi enthusiasts, and even neuroscientists have drawn connections for decades between times of crisis and people creating and watching science fiction. One proposed reason is that scifi helps us to navigate and prepare for future threats that are out of our control. To “simulate” the layers of fear and emotions we feel about scenarios like plagues, nuclear warfare, societal change, and ultimately to cope better.
Sometimes films depict literal threats like plagues and killer robots, but others portray more metaphorical scenarios that stand in for real threats, says Luke Devenish, a professional screenwriter and lecturer on genre screenwriting at The University of Melbourne.
For example, he says creatures like zombies are often a representation of plagues and disease – think Will Smith’s I am Legend (pictured, left).
While other figures like King Kong represent a scifi sub-genre called “Earth’s Revenge” where the Earth sends an agent to punish us, usually for our arrogance and destruction of the environment. Godzilla, for instance, can be read as a metaphor for nuclear destruction after the bombing of Japan in World War II.
Given the past 12 months, none of it now seems particularly farfetched.
“I mean we are living in a dystopia right now,” says Devenish (pictured, below). “A dystopia is a society where something is fundamentally wrong with it.”
He says Contagion, whose screenwriter Scott Z. Burns consulted closely with epidemiologists to construct a highly plausible plague scenario, triggered our deepest existential fears about ourselves and the future.
The thriller, which depicted the origin of viruses like Covid-19 due to humans disrupting natural habitats, prompted us to ask: How will I manage this kind of reality? What will happen to my family, to my society?
Not that sci fi always gets it right. Or even often. The reality is that the genre’s ‘predictions’ over the years have been hit and miss.
On occasion, science fiction has predicted major new inventions. Indeed, the idea for the helicopter is attributed by its inventor to writer Jules Verne who described it in his 1886 novel, The Clipper of the Clouds. Verne had previously written that “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”
Similarly, something very closely resembling the flip phone appeared in the 1979 Star Trek movie which inspired Motorola’s 1996 model, named “StarTAC” after the film.
However, most of the time the genre falls short of prophesy. Who else sighed when the year 2015 arrived and the world looked nothing like the future predicted in Back to the Future II, decked out with flying cars, hoverboards and self-tying Nikes?
Even Stephen King responded on Twitter about his novel The Stand, where around 99% of the world’s population die, saying, “No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions.”
But with the coronavirus changing the world as we know it, perhaps science fiction, from the plague variety to stories based in outer space, could help us navigate not just our current reality, but also the post-coronavirus world.
While the genre may not give an exact blueprint, we could use it to process different realities such as widespread technological advances and use of AI and robots, which we could be racing towards thanks to the pandemic.
Scifi creators have been fixated with AI and robots since the early twentieth century technology boom. We’ve seen the emergence of the sociopathic killer trope in films such as the early German silent flick Metropolis (1927; pictured, left), evolving into The Terminator and The Matrix, as well as more nuanced villains like the haunting Hal 9000 in 2001: Space Odyssey.
And while recent decades have brought us some cuddlier or good guy robots (think WALL-E, Marvel’s Vision), when it comes to AI we remain both fascinated and fearful – fears that are often amplified by scifi.
Scifi often deals with cautionary tales about technology and the misuse of power. The idea of the surveillance state is the nightmare of many classic scifi films such as V for Vendetta, Gattaca, and of course, Orwell’s 1984.
Yet neuro-psychology researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center believe the genre could help us to mentally rehearse and ultimately work through the range of conflicting emotions we continue to feel about technology and the future.
And there is plenty to work through.
With the mammoth efforts going into stopping the pandemic, the coronavirus could certainly be a catalyst for more robots and AI in healthcare and normal life in the future, says Stephen Bornstein (pictured, right), the CEO of the cutting-edge robotics and AI company, Cyborg Dynamics Engineering. (“Yeah, I wanted a cool sounding name,” Bornstein laughs.)
His Brisbane company works mainly with the Australian Defence Force making ground robots and automated technology to support troops entering dangerous areas. “If you think about ground robots in the military, the question is how do we get a human out of harm’s way and use machines instead?”
The 2017 Australian Young Engineer of the Year says the same thinking is being applied to coronavirus around the world. In places such as Wuhan, Seoul and Northern Italy, robots have been used to disinfect rooms, take people’s temperature using infrared sensors and deliver food to Covid patients. One of the robots that visits patients has a cute digital face, wearing a mask. We’ve even seen a robot “dog” called SPOT trialled in Singapore which encouraged social distancing in parks. SPOT is now being used in hospitals in Boston as a walking telehealth robot.
And in South Korea, AI-backed technology and surveillance (including street cameras and money transactions) has been used in contact tracing to find and isolate positive cases.
Scifi could help us to accept advanced futures (and not feel so nervous about seeing SPOT in the park). But in this case perhaps its role is to teach us to be rightly suspicious, to avoid a reality in which we’re ruled by Big Brother or the Tyrell Corporation in the 1982 Bladerunner, to be cautious about the technology we make.
We’ve seen a very contemporary version of this in the 2020 film, Songbird (pictured, right), which imagines the worst case scenario of the current pandemic – a highly mutated “Covid-23”, quarantine camps, helicopters overhead, and ominous sanitation goons willing to break down your door.
But these warnings come with the promise of a more hopeful future, says Simon Foster (pictured, below), the Festival Director of the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival and Sydney’s Monster Fest.
In his work across several film festivals, Foster has seen more of the scifi genre’s full breadth than most, from mainstream films that we know and love to indie films (both Australian and international) that range from the experimental to the positively avant garde.
“Science fiction and science do have a sort of love-hate relationship,” he says. “[But] the very best science fiction, even with an inherently bleak vision of society, speaks to a better vision and why it got so bad. It’s trying to direct us on a better path.
“Science fiction with a terrible society is saying we should avoid this terrible existence.”
Screenwriter Luke Devenish calls this the “caution with optimism combination”. He says Scifi films, even dystopian films like Contagion, are fundamentally life affirming and hopeful. “At the end of the day, technology is bested by the best of humanity, our resilience… The things we treasure about humanity come to the fore.”
Scifi isn’t just about plagues, technology and aliens, he says, but about heroism, big and small, our faith in humanity, and what drives us to carry on when nothing is the same. It’s telling us, ultimately, that we will be okay.
“Do you notice there are no countries in Star Trek? We’re just from planet Earth.”
Science fiction can also ask bigger questions. And there’s nothing like the stars to make us feel a little existential, says Simon Foster.
From his years programming speculative film narratives, if there was one movie he’d recommend for perspective about the coronavirus and the future, it would be a film called ★. S-t-a-r.
★’s Viennese director Johann Lurf (pictured, right) is one of the world’s greatest montage filmmakers, taking clips from other artists and condensing them into an entirely different thing.
Featured in the 2018 Rotterdam International Film Festival, ★ is a film of the night sky and galaxies depicted over 105 years of cinema. Every time the camera panned up from someone’s back yard or looked out to the stars on a spaceship, the frame appears in Lurf’s film.
There isn’t a single person featured and Lurf doesn’t cut the sound from any of the clips. This produces a fascinating mix of cinematic orchestra music, 50s jazz crackling like paper, more modern sounds and of course that quintessential Star Wars orchestra.
“It’s an extraordinary film,” says Foster, “It speaks to why we still look to the stars as a species, [expressing] our fears and our hopes. The film worked over me like I’ve never experienced in cinema. It reinvigorated a sense of awe, a sense of scale. We’re still part of a much bigger universe.”
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 8:37AM 
“Unlike you, I never had a lot of interest in anything Sasquatch, certainly wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Sasquatch lore” Ashcroft laughs, speaking via Zoom from his Wellington home, “but now I am utterly obsessed and fascinated by all things Sasquatch! I am only just getting into this magnificent world of Bigfoot and his cousins across the world.” (Pictured, right: Ashcroft, on the set of Coming Home in the Dark)
Brooks’ novel was critically acclaimed upon release and spent several weeks on US bestseller lists. While acknowledging its B-monster movie premise was part of the fun, literary critic for The Gaurdian U.K., Neil McRobert, also pointed out that Brooks’ novel made for a challenging read in the time of COVID. “The true terror for a post-pandemic reader,” he said in his June 2020 review, “is in the grounded reality of how victims of disaster can be overlooked and how thin the veneer of civility and technology is revealed to be in the face of grand social disruption.”
