Sitges 2022: all the magic of the Festival has returned in an edition full of great cinema, surprises and a flavor of old normality

As always happens on a Monday around this time of the year, once again I am forced to look back with nostalgia at what has happened over just the last ten days, and to type a text that condenses what it has meant a new edition of my beloved Sitges Festival that has just ended and that, on this occasion, I have lived in a more particular way.

This 2022, after fifteen years of attending uninterruptedly, I have been able to enjoy the event from the unique perspective that being part of the Critic’s Jury, which has many pros and a small con, as I will explain a little later. But regardless of this, there is no doubt that this 55th edition has been the great return that many of us were waiting for.

Of course, this return through the front door has been marked, mainly, by a large assortment of feature films —and some other series— that they have once again filled the auditorium, Retiro, Prado and Tramuntana stalls to the brim. A gigantic selection —and, in some cases, incomprehensible— that has left us a Sitges 2022 to remember.

the old normal

Arriving in Sitges, entering the Meliá hall and taking a look at the atmosphere that prevailed in the town during the first hours of the Festival was an almost cathartic experience. The endless queues, the spontaneous conversations between strangers, the cafeterias full of groups discussing the latest screening so far…

The cluster of sensations invited to think that the last two years had not existed; that the pandemic was just a mirage and that the two past editions marked by limited capacity, hydroalcoholic gel, masks and safety distances were just a bad dream. It seemed that we had just left 2019 and that the contest never ceased to be the same as always.

This has not only been reflected in the atmosphere that has reigned on the coast of Sitges between October 6 and 16, but has also been made clear in record data that make this 55th edition the busiest in history, with 10.3% of attendees and 6.3% of collection more than in the last pre-pandemic appointment, and receiving a whopping 610 guests. So it goes back to the old normal.

Back to the ring

But if Paco Umbral went to ‘We want to know’ to talk about his book, we are here to talk about cinema, and Sitges 2022 has been more than served by it. In fact, this year, in addition to the reincorporation of the Órbita section with its indispensable dose of Korean thrillers —which, as I understand it, each and every one of them has been impeccable—, we have once again enjoyed —and, sometimes, suffered— a gigantic Official Competition Section with some somewhat strange titles.

Among these pieces, a priori, misplaced, have been the surprisingly solvent and enjoyable victorian biopic ‘Emily’centered on the author of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and devoid of any connection with the fantastic; soporific video essays like ‘Everything Will Be Ok’, which served Rithy Panh to win the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival; either more experimental proposals such as ‘Enys Men’ by Mark Jenkinthat perhaps would have fit better in some parallel section and that left the respectable somewhat disoriented by his repetitive flirtation with video art.

In addition to bewilderment, as could not be less, there has also been room for torpor and disappointment that have found their greatest exponents in ‘Gourmet Flux’how good it seems a 111-minute joke that is only funny to its director Peter Stricklandand in one ‘You will not be alone’ that has ended up scratching the Young Jury Prize thanks to its endless and arrhythmic nineteenth-century and Malickian drama with witchcraft and motherhood as a backdrop.

That yes, the disappointments have ended up being a small, almost negligible, part of the 32 films in competition that I have had the privilege of swallowing throughout the contest. On the other side of the coin, those films that, almost certainly, can only be translated into successesand which are headed by the hulking ‘Irati’ by Paul Urkijo; a true miracle of sword, sorcery, monsters and love for the fantastic film shot in Basque that exudes passion in each of its frames, that excites by showing that there is room for this type of cinema within our borders, and that ended up winning a well deserved Audience Award.

In this same league the already parishioner of Sitges has played Quentin Dupeuxthat this 2022 has come twice with the hilarious ‘Smoking causes cough’ and ‘Incredible but true’ —both winners of the Best Screenplay Award—; two works differentiated in their narrative, the second being much more conventional than the first, but full of that genius and that surreal inventiveness that only the unclassifiable French filmmaker manages to capture successfully on the screen.

Along with Dupieux, Ti West returned six years after passing through the Sitges screens with ‘The Valley of Vengeance’ to dazzle the public with ‘Pearly’; a brilliant prequel to his porn-slasher ‘X’ that puts its tight footage at the service of a huge Mia Gothand whose twisted character study and formal treatment in the purest style of 1950s Hollywood melodrama took the cat to water in the categories of best direction and best actress.

And, how could it be otherwise, this selection of long-awaited triumphs closes a much-loved duo at the Festival. This is none other than the one made up of Justin Benson and Aaron Mooreheadthat after delighting us with ‘Spring’, ‘Infinity’ and ‘Synchronic’, return to their most indie with ‘Something in the Dirt’; a cosmic story full of their usual affiliations that is still a celebration of the seventh art and, as they themselves point out in the final dedication, shooting movies among friends. More than enough to have taken our Critics Award for Best Film.

Life gives you surprises

However, as a general rule, the real juice of the Sitges Festival lies in the surprises. In those sessions to which you enter blindly only to discover films that make you applaud until your palms itch, that inspire you and make you have faith that cinema can still survive away from the gears of the great studies and precooked formulas.

The great discovery of the year may have been ‘Huesera’, the feature film debut of Mexican Michelle Garzato whom we awarded the Citizen Kane Award for best direction reveal; an awe-inspiring tale that brings to light the terrors of motherhood—both earthly and supernatural—with remarkable mise-en-scène, a truly inspired cast, and tense yet effective atmospheric management.

On the other hand, the controversy of Sitges 2022 came from the hand of the chilling Danish film ‘Speak No Evil’with which Christian Tafdrup displays a tremendous mastery of cinematographic language to upset the stomach of even the most seasoned viewer. A tour de force suffocating directed wonderfully that plays to the containment and the crescendo of constant tension until it ends in the third most savage, cruel and devastating act that we have seen in a long, long time; which has resulted in praises and sticks —in my opinion, undeserved— in equal parts.

At the opposite pole were two sessions that turned the room into a real party of those that only take place in this holy house. The first of them was the ‘Project Wolf Hunting’the only South Korean title that entered the Official Competition Section, with which Kim Hong-sun bathed the Auditori screen in blood with its brutal action thriller loaded with monsters, criminals, various dismemberments and mutilations. A revelry defined by the excess that made one of the central speakers of the cinema pass away – and rightly so.

the second was ‘Sisu’, the great winner in the list of winners of this 55th edition and that practically no one saw due to the strange hours at which it was scheduled, but that revolutionized the Tramuntana in its first screening. In it, Jalmari Helander, who already crowned Sitges 2011 with ‘Rare Exports’, signs an over-the-top, ultra-violent and hilarious war feat in which a kind of Finnish Rambo faces a Nazi squad, all seasoned with a great sense of humor, self-awareness, and a narrative and conflict management worthy of being studied in film schools.

Pure magic

As you can guess, Sitges is back to stay. This 55th edition has meant an experience as exhausting as it is rewarding in which the overdose of feature films to judge —which has prevented me from seeing Joe Begos’s ‘Christmas Bloody Christmas’— and the lower back pain caused by the hours spent sitting have been more than compensated by that magic that only this Festival exudes.

This magic that hides in little things like going down to breakfast and coffee next to Edgar Wright after greeting him as if he were your neighbor, being able to have inspiring and tremendously motivational talks with some of your favorite filmmakers, meeting people who, hopefully, will appear again in some time in the future, sharing a table with unexpected people and screaming at Nirvana karaoke.

But, above all this, if this magic is hidden in a place, it is in the sense of community and family that is breathed in every corner, in those moments of encounters with friends that have been born within the framework of the Festival, and in that collective celebration of fantastic and horror cinema that, without a doubt, we will repeat next year with even greater intensity.