Amazing, abstracted, razor-sharp homage to 70s Italian horror movies. “A delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire… An outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip.” — New Directors/New Films
An eroticized homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies reimagined as an avant-garde trance film.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2010
Amer 2009
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are a Belgian couple who have made five short films together. Amer is their dazzling debut feature, a film divided into three parts: the childhood, adolescence and womanhood of a character named Ana. The film is a near dialogue-free ode d’amore to Italian orrore maestros, in which the technicolours of Mario Bava, the sensual camerawork of Dario Argento and the pulse-pounding scores of Ennio Morricone provide a lush bed for the grisly deaths executed by a black-gloved killer. At times the film’s bold experimental nature recalls the works of Stan Brakhage. Clinical compositions of rigorous artifice and symbolism become Freudian Rorschach tests revealing characters’ repressed sexual desire and hidden malevolence. Its creation has defined a new genre: the Slasher-Art-Porn flick. — AT