After a plethora of short and mid-length films, which exhausted the limits of his hybrid genre, Bertrand Mandico became known and loved, by international and Greek audiences with his debut, feature film “The Wild Boys” (2017). With the 11th AAGFF’s tribute “Bertrand Mandico: Sensory Witchcraft”, an opportunity is given to Greek audiences to acquaint themselves, with seventeen short and mid-length films, from Μandico’s experimental oeuvre—permeated throughout, by its strong inclination for digressive narratives and a radical, personal aesthetic.
From his very first, short film “The Blue Chevalier”, the motif of ritual-ceremony, defined a large portion of his unclassifiable work that would follow—concerning at times, rituals on a woman’s internal organs as in “Prehistoric Cabaret” and at others, enigmatic fatal games as in “He Says He's Dead”. This obsession of his, is not absent from “Boro in the Box”, which is freely inspired from the life of Polish auteur Walerian Borowczyk. Mandico’s films are characterised by a stormy barrage of poetry and strangeness: futuristic myths and female artists persecuted by their lust for legacy, in “Ultra Purple”; baroque stories on repressed impulses escaping—with colurful, excessive, effusive characters in “Our Lady of Hormones”; sketches combining self-referentiality and mise en abyme in “All You Have Seen Is True”; reappraisal and explosion of legendary myths in “Any Virgin Left Alive?”; heroines haunted by demons and fantasies in “Feminisme, Rafale Et Politique”; by old memories in “S... Sa... Salam... Salammbô…”—mainly taking place in melancholy landscapes of the frozen north, or even in non-existent planets. Mandico swears, that appearances deceive in “Depressive Cop”, and that anyway, as he himself says, “the end of the world is never far away”.
Like a meteor, arriving from a parallel universe, he blows up stereotypes and norms from our world—sharing with us, his own utopias—queer, playful and sensual.
Film selection, programming, introduction: Olia Verriopoulou
