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If you walk through the centre of Lisbon from this Thursday, the 3rd, until the 13th, you run the risk of hearing screams coming from a cinema: another horror marathon is kicking off with the return of MOTELX, this time in an expanded format. For the first time, the festival runs for ten days and gains extra space by adding a second venue, the Cinemateca Portuguesa, to its usual home at Cinema São Jorge. This growth has a clear reason, as there is a round-number anniversary to celebrate: the 20th edition.
The festival, directed by João Monteiro and Pedro Souto, has reached a respectable maturity and has been gradually gaining in importance since its first edition in 2007.
This year, the opening screening brings us the film Drag (USA), by Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, produced by Danny DeVito. The programme includes a tribute strand to Italian director Sergio Martino, a master of giallo, who will receive the “Master of Horror” statuette, and a celebration of the centenary of the birth of Roger Corman, a guest at the 2017 edition, who will be honoured through his widow Julie Corman, another of the festival’s guests of honour. The Noémia Delgado Award, which MOTELX established last year to honour women who have stood out in the genre, is awarded to the Portuguese-Swedish filmmaker Solveig Nordlund, director of films such as Low-Flying Aircraft (2002), based on the work of JG Ballard.
The “Room Service” section, which showcases the most eye-catching films, includes titles such as Fuck My Son! (USA), by Todd Rohal, which the festival presents as “a tasteless X-rated comedy”; AnyMart (Japan), by Yusuke Iwasaki, which exposes the dark side of the Japanese world of work; and two Belgian-French co-productions: Species_,_a piece of body horror by Marion Le Correller, and The Birthday Party, by Léa Mysius, starring Monica Bellucci. These two films are also contenders for the Meliès d’Argent for best European film, alongside Bloody Tennis, by Nikias Chryssos (Germany), Bodyhackers, by Carlos Conceição (Portugal), Ferine, by Andrea Corsini (Italy), No Rest for the Wicked, by Kasper Kalle (Denmark), and The Rest of It, by María Martínez Bayona (United Kingdom/Spain/Norway).
This year’s MOTELX also brings to the big screen a season devoted to horror films made in Eastern European countries under communist rule, under the title Lost in Europe: Terror Behind the Iron Curtain, with films from the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. Finally, there is the opportunity to see or revisit some classics, such as the 1979 version of Nosferatu directed by Werner Herzog and with Klaus Kinski in the main role, or the infamous NEKromantik, by Jörg Buttgereit (1988), regarded as one of the most shocking films ever made.