The Sitges Festival, which will celebrate its 56th edition from October 5 to 15, is already beginning in Cannes. And it is that it has been within the framework of the French festival, specifically in the Fantastic Pavilion of the Marché du Film, the place chosen to present this year's poster this morning and the inaugural film, which will come from the hand of Paco Plaza and his Sister death, prequel to the blockbuster Verónica (2017), nominated for seven Goya awards.
As is already tradition, the CHINA agency has been in charge of shaping the visual identity of the festival directed by Ángel Sala, present at the event together with the director of the Sitges Foundation, Mónica García. The prestigious photographer Nacho Alegre has dared to break with the dynamics of the posters of recent years, separating himself from leitmotifs and offering a chilling, elegant and suggestive image in equal parts that pays homage to The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock, just when They celebrate six decades of its premiere.
"We didn't want to do a loop commemorating the typical birthday anniversary of movies and this time we've changed the idea a bit. The image of the poster starts from a concept, from a conversation around a movie like The Birds, but it talks about everything of the language of the fantastic and of the imagination. And it invokes through blood, which is perhaps the most beautiful and pure element of the language of the fantastic, love and passion for the genre", commented Sala, who added that each one is free to interpret the image of the bloody hands as one wishes.
For his part, Plaza, a regular at the Sitges Festival, was excited to open this 2023 with a horror story shot in Valencia, his homeland, written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and starring Aria Bedmar, Almudena Amor and Maru Valdivielso: "I'm wearing 32 years attending the Sitges festival as a spectator, since 1991, and the fact of being able to not only be present and participate but also inaugurate what for me is the best horror film festival in the world is an honor and a source of pride," he said. . "The Auditorium is a huge place but when I have presented a film there and I look at the 2,000 seats with more than half of them I have had beers. Sitges is a very special place where we celebrate a way of seeing life and being in the world ", he concluded gratefully.
Shot almost entirely in the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo de Cotalba, in a town near Gandía, the film recovers the supernatural universe of Verónica; It is a horror story with a feminine key, which will take us to post-war Spain, taking as a point of reference a convent shaken by the arrival of Narcisa, a young novice with supernatural powers.
