MOTELX offers more than 60 screenings to showcase the best of Portuguese and international horror, with
guests such as Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) and veteran actor Jack Taylor. Tickets
go on sale this Friday, 30 August.The
opening session on 10 September brings the Portuguese premiere of
Ma, a thriller by
Tate Taylor (The Help, The Girl on a Train) with Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer in the
role of a lonely woman who befriends a group of teenagers and hosts their parties in her
basement – if certain rules are obeyed.
Come to Daddy closes the Festival on 15 September
with an equally bold and unexpected turn from Elijah Wood.
The American director
Ari Aster is a guest of honour at this year’s MOTELX and will present
the Portuguese premiere of the hotly anticipated
Midsommar (13 September, 9pm) and a
special screening of last year’s sensation,
Hereditary (14 September, 3.30pm), both with Q&As.
Aster will also give a
masterclass about folk horror with
Howard David Ingham (author of We
Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror, followed by an autograph session (15
September, 5.30pm).
MOTELX will pay tribute to the veteran J
ack Taylor, a leading figure in genre cinema and a
favourite of Spanish exploitation movies from the 60s and the 70s. Taylor further participated
in films from John Milius, Ridley Scott and Milos Forman, and appeared with Johnny Depp in
Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, shot in Portugal. The actor will be a guest at a special
screening on Friday 13 September (7pm) which will show the documentary Jack Taylor,
Testigo del Fantástico (by Sitges Festival programmer Diego López) and
Necronomicon
(1968, also known as Succubus), a cult movie by Jesús Franco that was shot in Lisbon.
Curiously, it marked Taylor’s debut in a leading role and Karl Lagerfeld’s first experience in
costume design.
There are 8 films in competition for the
MOTELX Award for Best European Feature / Méliès
d’Argent, organised in partnership with the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation.
They are:
Keep Me Company, by Gonçalo Almeida (Portugal, world premiere);
All the Gods in
the Sky, by Quarxx (France);
Extra Ordinary, by Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman (Ireland,
Belgium);
Finale, by Søren Juul Petersen (Denmark);
Get In, by Olivier Abbou (France);
A Good
Woman is Hard to Find, by Abner Pastoll (UK, Belgium, Ireland - international premiere);
The
Hole in the Ground, by Lee Cronin (UK); and
Why Don’t You Just Die!, by Kirill Sokolov
(Russia).
MOTELX’s
Room Service section presents the best horror films from the last 2 years. Among
the highlights of the 26-film selection is the Brazilian
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano
Dornelles), a Cannes sensation that won this year’s Jury Prize. There is also a strong crop of
Asian films, such as
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (Lee Won-Tae, South Korea), the
Japanese
It Comes (Tetsuya Nakashima) and the Indian
Tumbbad (Rahi Anil Barve). From the
US comes the feminist western
The Wind (Emma Tammi) and
Nightmare Cinema, an
anthology by the likes of Mick Garris and Joe Dante with Mickey Rourke in the role of a
diabolical projectionist. The European selection includes
Lords of Chaos (Jonas Åkerlund),
based on the real story of a Norwegian black metal band with an appetite for Mayhem.
The
Doc Horror section returns with documentaries about two legendary B-movie directors,
Jairo Pinilla (
Jairo’s Revenge, Simon Hernandez) and Al Adamson (
Blood & Flesh, David
Gregory). It will also screen
Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (Xavier Burgin), a
documentary that provides an in-depth look into the role of African Americans in American
horror movies.
MOTELX celebrates the 60 th anniversary of sci-fi horror gem
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959,
Ed Wood) with a live commentary screening with some of Portugal’s best-known comedians.
As it had been announced, the Festival will also host special screenings to celebrate
Alien’s
40th anniversary (shown in a 4K restored version) and MOTELX’s first Friday the 13th in its 13-
year history (with the original
Friday the 13th ). To keep superstition at bay, the 13th will also
bring a “
MOTELX After Dark” party with the Belgian cosmo-burlesque collective
Dance
Divine (Casa de Desenho, Santos-Rio).
A highly anticipated tradition in the Lisbon rentrée,
MOTELX will organise free
Warm-Up
events from 5 to 7 September. On 5 September, the
Portuguese Ancient Art Museum will
open its doors to the Festival for a midnight descent into Art Hell. On Friday 6 September
there’s a chance to listen to
“A Piano Tuned by Fear”, a cine-concert at Lisbon’s scenic São
Pedro de Alcântara Convent in which Filipe Raposo will offer a new take on 13 famous horror
movie themes. To top off the programme, the following Saturday will bring an open-air
screening of Tim Burton’s
Ed Wood at Largo Trindade Coelho, a nudge towards the Plan 9
celebrations.
PROGRAMME HERE.
Tickets to MOTELX go on sale at 11am this Friday 30 August on Ticketline. They
can be purchased at Cinema São Jorge’s box office from 3 September.