Jane Schoenbrun’s acclaimed horror I Saw the TV Glow will open the festival

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When asked which films best represent the polar extremes of programming at this year’s Calgary Underground Film Festival, co-founder and lead programmer Brenda Lieberman points to Ghostlight’s Alex Thompson.
and Kelly O’Sullivan’s tender American comedy-drama about family, grief and community theatre, and Canadian director Chris Nash’s visceral, slow-burning horror film In A Violent Nature.

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Presumably, Lieberman saw them at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where they both received a lot of attention.

“In terms of excitement, it was Ghostlight,” Lieberman says. “I practically cried through that whole movie, it’s very emotional. It’s very good and it really brings you closer to this family and this world. “It was hard for me to have to see anything after that day at Sundance.”

In A Violent Nature, while also receiving good reviews, is a very different film, a clever point-of-view twist on the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie that doesn’t hold back on the gore.

“It’s really graphic horror,” Lieberman says. “But it’s a really quiet, slow-paced slasher movie, done in a really different and unique way.”

The festival announced the lineup for its 21st edition on Wednesday. We feature dozens of titles covering wildly different topics, genres, and subgenres in dark, outlandish, provocative, or just plain ridiculous ways. The festival, which will screen selections at the Globe Cinema from April 18 to 28, will also feature several special events. That includes the return of cult Baltimore filmmaker John Waters, who will offer his talk show Devil’s Advocate on April 24 at the Globe and then present his 1994 film Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner. Waters last attended CUFF in 2012.

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“We realized he was already on tour, so we thought this was the perfect way to bring him back,” Lieberman says. “It’s a brand new show that we haven’t shown before and tying it into the festival was the perfect way to get it back into our lineup and seemed like a good fit for Serial Mom’s 30th anniversary.”

On April 17, one day before the festival’s official opening, CUFF will celebrate National Canadian Film Day with a screening of Jim Makichuk’s 1981 thriller Ghostkeeper. The film was shot in Lake Louise and Banff and was the only Alberta title filmed under the Canadian tax shelter program of the 1980s, which also allowed films such as Louis Malle’s Atlantic City with Burt Lancaster, Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner with Elliott Gould, Reitman’s Ivan Meatballs with Bill Murray, Peter Medak’s The Changeling with George C. Scott, and Bob Clark’s Porky’s.

The festival will open on April 18 with the Canadian premiere of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, which was also a provocative hit at Sundance. Schoenbrun is a non-binary filmmaker whose previous film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an acclaimed coming-of-age horror film. I Saw the TV Glow is also a psychological horror film that centers on two teenagers obsessed with a television show.

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“It really speaks to today’s youth culture and fandom and what’s going on with media and the world of television,” Lieberman says. “We wanted something that was highly anticipated but also addressed some of the specific programming we’re doing at the festival.”

While CUFF hosts a separate festival each year in November for documentary films, this lineup includes some non-fiction films, including the Canadian premiere of Andrew Reich’s Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story about the influential California college punk-rock band which was formed in 1978 when the members were still pre-teens; Art & Life: The Story of Jim Phillips, by John Edward Makens, about the pioneering skateboard-punk artist; John MacLaverty’s Loch Ness, which is self-explanatory: they created a monster; Thank You Very Much by Alex Braverman, which is about comedian and performance artist Andy Kaufman, and Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello by Eric Weinrib and Nate Pommer, about the career of Ukrainian band leader Eugene Hütz.

Other films include Francis Gallupi’s The Last Stop in Yuma Country, a Tarantino-style neo-Western heist thriller. Gallupi and star Jim Cummings are expected to attend the festival.

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“It’s a crowd-pleasing movie,” Lieberman says. “He has a humor that we all fell in love with.”

There will be a retrospective of two films by Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, including the 1997 sci-fi-horror cult classic Cube and his 2003 surreal comedy Nothing. Andrew Miller and David Hewlett, who both starred, will attend.

Calgary expat Caden Douglas will also be on hand to host the Canadian premiere of Mother Father Sister Brother Frank, a dark comedy horror film about a dysfunctional family starring Fact of Life’s Mindy Cohn. Douglas was born and raised in Calgary but currently lives in Los Angeles.

Humane is the debut dystopian thriller from second-generation filmmaker Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of icon David Cronenberg, and stars Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire Enrico Colantoni and Peter Gallagher.

“At the end of the day, we’re showing films that are creative and very audience-oriented,” says Lieberman. “Films that we believe are best experienced in the film environment with everyone. While some of them might be released shortly after, the idea is that we’re curating content that you otherwise wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with or know where to find it and be able to experience it together.”

The Calgary Underground Film Festival will take place April 18-28 at the Globe Cinema. Visit calgaryundergroundfilm.org for complete programming and showtimes.

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