Festival Reviews
SWANA Film Festival Q&A with Festival Head Hajer
SWANA is a decolonial term for the South West Asian & North African region.
Rolmar Baldonado
April 8, 2023
The film centres on a young, precocious neuroscientist, Tomohiko Kataoka (Daigo Nishihata), who visits a secluded island to become part of a research team exploring the links between the mind and virtual reality. Tomohiko receives intermittent apparitions of the dead woman haunting the island and its inhabitants. The apparitions manifest within their virtual reality experiments as if the vengeful ghost has found a pathway through this man-made medium.
The style is no different from THE GRUDGE series, where the ghost of the brutally departed victim seeks revenge, but this time around, the attacks happen within an imagined reality. Or do they? The supernatural meets the futuristic world as a plotline is new territory for Shimizu as he marries the unpredictability of both.
The film’s highlight happens in the sea, and the experience of drowning is virtually experienced within the confines of a lab. That could be the most original this horror instalment gets as most elements remain faithful to the scare tactics of the previous GRUDGE movies. It is a novel premise on its own, although the murky waters of genre blending extend the audience’s experience of reality itself.
SWANA is a decolonial term for the South West Asian & North African region.
The recent French Film Festival featured a generous 54 films in their lineup. Out of this eclectic collection, I am recommending 23 of them as the best of the lot.