At NIFFF, Class Struggle Retrospective Invites Attendees to Eat the Rich

variety.com:

Ben Croll Since taking over in 2022, NIFFF director Pierre-Yves Walder has made the festival’s socially tinged retrospective program a hallmark of his tenure.

Rounding out a so-called trilogy that started with queer representation then followed with a gender focus that put the femme fatale and scream queen under the spotlight, this year’s retrospective will tackle class conflict in cheeky terms, putting the screws to those swells with a 20 film program titled Eat the Rich. “Genre cinema has always treated questions of predation, exploitation and everyday brutality with such complexity,” says Walder, “which makes it so interesting to how this theme evolves over the course of film history.” The far-ranging program tackles nearly a century worth of upper-class perfidy, beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s early-Soviet sci-fi “Aelita” from 1924 and running through to Jenna Cato Bass’ South African servitude creeper “Good Madam” from 2021.

In between are landmarks like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” and Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” cult classics like Oshii Mamoru’s “Ghost in the Shell” and Mary Harron’s “American Psycho,” and modern standouts like Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer” and Ari Aster’s “Midsommar.” Linking the diverse slate – which runs the gamut from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Porcile” to John Carpenter’s “They Live” – is an earnest desire to thoughtfully engage with the questions the films raise.

With that goal in mind, Walder and his team programed the retrospective with help from academics and sociologists, organizing conferences and looking for films that embodied key social dynamics. “I love exploring my concerns and interests and curiosities through cinema,” Walder explains.