Poster by Geof Darrow
It’s that time again for my annual sojourn to Fantastic Fest, the annual Alamo Drafthouse week long love letter to horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. This year’s festival runs from Sept 18-25, here in Austin in the South Lamar location.
As in year’s past, I begin my coverage with a multi-part/day preview.
Fantastic Fest Preview Day Two
The Creeping Garden
Who says you need a work of fiction to take you to the far reaches of space to explore the unusual, beautiful and strange? Too often we forget that world around us is positively littered with the odd and the alien. So enter directors Jasper Sharp and Tim Grabham with their gorgeously photographed documentary The Creeping Garden to remind us.
Enter the world of the slime mould, a microbial life form that exists in thousands of species all around us but is seldom acknowledged or studied. Yes, the faint of heart will be warned off by their very name and, yes, they can be rather slimey. But viewed in time lapse macro photography – as they are throughout the film – these are weirdly alien and beautiful structures, pulsating with life as they form patterns and overcome obstacles with what scientists believe are signs of primitive intelligence.
And as compelling (read: odd) as the moulds themselves are they are nothing compared to the people who have built their lives around them. Sharp and Grabham take a sort of Errol Morris approach to their subjects – scientists, artists and amateur enthusiasts – leaving them free to wax poetic about their most unusual obsession leading the viewer to conclude that perhaps some of the humans around us are every bit as alien as the things that grow unseen in the dark and perhaps the world is a better – or at least more interesting – place because of it.(Todd Brown)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHNblyiZm3E
