Directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
The title is the French word for “bitter” but this provocative and sensational debut is anything but. An oneiric, eroticized homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies reimagined as an avant-garde trance film, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s pastiche tour de force plays out a delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire. Its three movements, each in a different style, correspond to the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of its female protagonist—and that’s all you need to know. Drawing its stylized, hyperbolic gestures from the playbooks of Bava, Leone, Argento, and De Palma and taking them into a realm of near-abstraction, Amer has genre in the blood. Its bold wide-screen compositions, super-focused sound, emphatic music (lifted from original giallo soundtracks), and razor-sharp cuts make for an outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip. An Olive Films release.
2009. Belgium/France. 90 min.
SCREENING WITH
Catafalque – directed by Christoph Rainer
For two boys locked in a basement, boundaries become blurred between dream and reality, light and shadow, life and death. 2010. Austria. 13 min.
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Fri Apr 2: 9:15 (FSLC)
Sat Apr 3: 2:00 (MOMA)
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS:
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani were born in 1976. They met each other in Brussels where they started to codirect and produce short films with their own funds. Their films are cinematic experimentations around giallo, leather, and strange pleasures.
