Boston Underground Film Festival Unveils Their Terrifying 2023 Line-up
Mary Beth McAndrews
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The 23rd annual Boston Underground Film Festival returns to Harvard Square’s arthouse hub The Brattle Theatre with five days of vanguard cinema from March 22nd through the 26th.
BUFF hosts the World Premiere of Jeffrey A. Brown’s haunting, Massachusetts-based horror thriller The Unheard. Starring Lachlan Watson (Chucky, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), The Unheard follows a deaf young woman ensconced in a signal-to-noise mystery of dueling senses, realities, truths, identities, and possibly worlds. Brown (2019’s The Beach House) and writers Michael and Shawn Rassmussen (2019’s Crawl) will be in attendance.
Fresh off its world premiere at Sundance, Boston Underground Film Festival will also host the East Coast Premiere of Eddie Alcazar’s retro-sci-fi, WTF masterpiece Divinity. Starring Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Bella Thorne, and produced by Steven Soderbergh, this deranged, drug-addled, dystopian vision, where beauty and grotesquery abound, is 100% uncompromising underground cinema.
On the heels of its SXSW debut, writer/director Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster lands at BUFF for its East Coast Premiere. Teen science genius Vicaria (The Equalizer’s Laya DeLeon Hayes) plays god when she embarks on a quest to find the cure for death, a disease, she theorizes, versus an inevitability, whose destructive path of substance abuse, brutality, and violence has rendered itself through her family and community. Breathing new life into Frankenstein’s monster, Story’s electric feature debut challenges conceptions of mortality and monstrosity through a Black lens.
Boston Underground Film Festival will also have its usual veritable bounty of shorts programming, celebrating the finest animation, transgressive horror, comedy, homegrown horror, and genre-inspired music videos.
A limited number of festival badges are available for purchase on the Brattle Theatre’s site. Tickets will be on sale at www.brattlefilm.org and www.bostonunderground.org
Badgeholders will be able to make screening selections starting Friday, March 10th, before tickets are released to the General Public on Monday, March 13.
BOSTON UNDERGROUND 2023 FEATURES LINE-UP
THE UNHEARD – World Premiere / Opening Night Film
Dir. Jeffrey A. Brown | USA | 2023
In this haunting Massachusetts-set thriller, 20-year-old Chloe Grayden (Lachlan Watson – Chucky, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) begins to suffer from auditory hallucinations following an experimental procedure to restore her damaged hearing. Seemingly related to the mysterious disappearance of her mother, Chloe’s grasp on reality will rely on discerning between signal and noise.
NIGHTSIREN – East Coast Premiere
Dir. Tereza Nvotová | Slovakia, Czech Republic | 2022
A young woman returns to her native mountain village searching for answers about her troubled childhood, but as she tries to uncover the truth, ancient superstitions lead the villagers to accuse her of witchcraft and murder.
SPAGHETTI JUNCTION – East Coast Premiere
Dir. Kirby McClure | USA | 2022
August, a recently disabled Southern teen, sees a flash in the sky and begins having strange dreams that beckon her to a cave in the woods. There she encounters a mysterious injured young man called “The Traveler” who needs her help.
ENYS MEN – New England Premiere
Dir. Mark Jenkin | UK | 2022
Set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast, a wildlife volunteer’s daily observations of a rare flower turn into a metaphysical journey that forces her as well as the viewer to question what is real and what is a nightmare.
DIVINITY – East Coast Premiere
Dir. Eddie Alcazar | USA | 2023
In another time, in another place, scientist Sterling Pierce (Scott Bakula) dedicated his career to searching for the answer to eternal life, over time creating a substance known as “Divinity.” Now Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff) controls and manufactures his father’s once-benevolent serum… Society on this barren planet has been entirely perverted by the supremacy of the drug, whose true origins are shrouded in mystery. When two mysterious brothers arrive with a plan to abduct the mogul, and with the help of a seductress named Nikita, they will be set on a path hurtling toward true immortality. Featuring Bella Thorne and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, Divinity defies description and demands your attention.
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE – New England Premiere
Dir. Daniel Goldhaber | USA | 2022
A crew of environmental activists plots a daring plan to disrupt an oil pipeline.
MISTER ORGAN – New England Premiere
Dir. David Farrier | New Zealand | 2022
Journalist David Farrier is drawn into a game of cat and mouse with a mysterious individual. Delving deeper he unearths a trail of court cases, royal bloodlines and ruined lives, in this true story of psychological warfare.
MOON GARDEN – Massachusetts Premiere
Dir. Ryan Stevens Harris | USA | 2022
A comatose five-year-old girl journeys through an industrial wonderland to find her way back to consciousness.
PIAFFE – New England Premiere
Dir. Ann Oren | Germany | 2022
When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, introverted Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a foley artist. Suddenly, a horsetail starts growing out of her body.
SICK OF MYSELF – New England Premiere
Dir. Kristoffer Borgli | Norway, Sweden | 2022
Increasingly overshadowed by her boyfriend’s recent rise to fame as a contemporary artist creating sculptures from stolen furniture, Signe hatches a vicious plan to reclaim her rightfully deserved attention within the milieu of Oslo’s cultural elite.
SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING – Massachusetts Premiere
Dir. Quentin Dupieux | France | 2022
A group of vigilantes called the “tobacco forces” is falling apart. To rebuild team spirit, their leader suggests that they meet for a week-long retreat, before returning to save the world.
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER – East Coast Premiere
Dir. Bomani J. Story | USA | 2023
Brilliant teen scientist Vicaria (The Equalizer’s Laya DeLeon Hayes) theorizes that death is a curable disease and embarks on a dangerous journey to bring back her recently murdered brother.
STAND BY FOR FAILURE: A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT NEGATIVLAND – New England Premiere
Dir. Ryan Worsley | USA | 2022
Documentarian Ryan Worsley explores cut-and-paste sonic social critics/sound collagists/pranksters Negativland, who have held a mirror up to media and culture and defied copyright laws from the fringes for the last 40+ years.
REBEL – New England Premiere / Closing Night Film
Dir. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah | Belgium, Luxembourg, France | 2022
When Kamal resolves to change his life for the better, he leaves Belgium to help war victims in Syria. But, having arrived, he is forced to join a militia and is left stranded in Raqqa. Back home, his younger brother Nassim quickly becomes easy prey for radical recruiters, who promise to reunite him with Kamal. Their mother, Leila, fights to protect the only thing she has left: her youngest son. Filmmakers Adil & Bilall (Bad Boys For Life, and the recent, infamously shelved Batgirl) deliver an immensely powerful and nuanced portrayal of a family torn apart over a little Muslim boy’s future that epitomizes a transformative cinematic experience.
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