The protagonist of 'The Squid Game', Freddy Krueger and Hazanavicius, at the Sitges Film Festival

One week before the start of its 55th edition, the Sitges festival announced this morning at a press conference at the Filmoteca de Catalunya the latest news of an edition that is expected to be "record-breaking", according to the organizers.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
28 September 2022 Wednesday 12:42
13 Reads
The protagonist of 'The Squid Game', Freddy Krueger and Hazanavicius, at the Sitges Film Festival

One week before the start of its 55th edition, the Sitges festival announced this morning at a press conference at the Filmoteca de Catalunya the latest news of an edition that is expected to be "record-breaking", according to the organizers. On the one hand, the town expects the arrival of 200,000 visitors in a year in which "we are returning to normality", in the words of the mayor of Sitges, Aurora Carbonell. On the other hand, the current figures for advance ticket sales stand at around 46,700, which equals the 2017 and 2018 editions, the best years of the festival, "a very high collection that is a symptom of the strong appeal of the festival", Carbonell has pointed out.

The director of the fantasy film competition, Ángel Sala, has named veteran British special effects and make-up specialist Colin Arthur as the recipient of the competition's Grand Honorary Award this year. With a career spanning more than half a century, Arthur has worked alongside renowned filmmakers such as Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Almodóvar or Spielberg and is the architect, among others, of the snake in Conan, the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; the blood that comes out of the elevator in The Shining or the creatures that populate the fantastic The Neverending Story, whose director, the German Wolfgang Petersen, died last August.

The Mèlies Award will go to Claudio Simonetti, composer of some of Dario Argento's most emblematic titles, such as Suspiria or Dark Red. And the German actress and director Astrid Frank, a reference in fantasy cinema directed by women, will receive the Honorary Maria.

Among the last confirmed guests, Michel Hazanavicius and Bérénice Bejo, director and actress of the Oscar-winning The artist, will attend the Catalan coast, who will present Coupez!, a film about zombies that opened the Cannes festival and is a remake of the Japanese One cut of the dead (2017).

Robert Englund, the actor in the guise of the mythical Freddy Krueger will return to the event to show the documentary Hollywood Dreams

Catalan cinema will be present with the screening of 32 films, in which it is involved to a greater or lesser extent and which show "that the audiovisual sector is gaining strength, although we still have the pending issue of re-industrialising it", said the director of the ICEC, Miquel Curanta.

Regarding the local scene, Nacho Vigalondo will be one of the directors of the second season of Historias para no dormir who will be in the competition accompanied by Javier Gurruchaga and Javier Gutiérrez. The director will come with La alarma, remake of the classic episode of the legendary series by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador.

After two years without the classic Zombie Walk, Saturday October 8 will be the day of the long-awaited meeting of the undead parade through Sitges. Precisely, Hazanavicius will be in charge of giving the starting gun. Sala has advanced that both the surprise session and the marathon will be highly anticipated films. "We want to have a party with a final fireworks," she said.

The closing film will be the latest production by Italian Luca Guadagnino, Bones and all, a cannibalistic fable starring Timothée Chalamet with which he won the award for best director in Venice.

The official jury of a Sitges festival that aims to be more sustainable than ever, will be made up of the director and producer William Lustig, known above all for the B-series thriller trilogy 'Maniac Cop'; the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez, one of the most recognized voices of genre literature in recent years; distributor Christophe Mercier, former vice president of Fox Searchlight Europe; Austrian actress Susanne Wuest, star of films such as Goodnight, Mom or The Wellness Cure, and Heidi Honeycutt, programmer for The American Cinematheque and co-founder of the Etheria Film Festival.

On the other hand, the recipients of the WomanInFan scholarships, the program for the visibility and incorporation of creative women, will have as a mentor Paco Plaza, a regular at the festival and one of the most expert voices in horror cinema.