Fractured Visions Film Festival
**** (overall)
Tramshed Cinema, Cardiff, Sat 29 – Sun 30 Sep.
Cardiff’s first edition of the Fractured Visions Film Festival was overall a success. Stepping up from a monthly cult movie screening, this festival, predicated on showing audiences the best of modern horror and genre cinema from across the world in the snug confines of Tramshed’s cinema, can be pleased with themselves for curating a superb package of great films. Out of a grand total of 20 films (10 features and 10 shorts), I’m gutted to have missed five, all of which sounded great and included the festival’s winning best short, Dead Cool, but sometimes film festival burnout gets to you. You forget to eat. You forget about daylight. You forget that you need to pee.
In fact, if there was one issue during the festival, it’s that the programming was sometimes a little bit too tightly-packed together – on the first day the gap between most films was a mere 20 minutes or so, which is quite hectic, with only one extended break for lunch. Who’d have thought that I’d be complaining about seeing too many films? Fortunately, there was only one major technical problem throughout the festival – missing subtitles on Luz – which is generally pretty good going for a first-time festival. I’ve been privy to young film festivals who have to cancel half a day’s worth of screenings because of failed projection issues. The atmosphere too was great – clearly a small but loyal crowd of hardcore cinephiles who wanted to talk about cinema, rather than the industry-weighted experiences you sometimes get, the subliminal suggestion that those at the festival are here to network and pitch their next project. Nope, Fractured Visions is about films and about our love of them.
The reports are as follows: