On October 5th, 2017, our dear friend and colleague Wim Castermans passed away. His death was a shock for his partner Vanessa and friends but also for the Offscreen Film Festival. Wim first started working for Offscreen in 2010 and quickly evolved into a fullyfledged organizer and programmer. His passion for film found an ideal outlet in the festival, which was enhanced by his professionalism, dedication, and talents for writing and networking. Wim’s smile, generosity and gentle self-mockery disarmed everyone who met him. What do you do when someone indispensable is no longer there? We had no choice but to launch ourselves into this latest Offscreen, hoping to keep the standard high despite his absence. We owe him that. This entire program is a tribute to Wim, but there will also be a special evening dedicated to his memory, which will include a screening of one of his favorite movies: “Mr. Vampire”.

Famously director and writer Luigi Cozzi observed that the Italian film industry during the 1960s and 1970s took on the traits of the exploitation film, in that movie producers did not ask what your film was like, they asked what film your film was like. In this way, he argued, Italy could produce Zombi 2, but never Zombi 1. It was positioned as the land that made The Last Shark but not Jaws. This perception of Italian genre cinema as imitative has stuck and many have viewed Italian genre films as nothing but cheap rip-offs with little redeeming value. However, increasingly the seemingly frenetic mix of genres and sub-genres that made up much of cinema in this period has been reassessed. Many of the films have become cult hits and have been celebrated for all their excess and absurdity as well as their surprising beauty and inventiveness. This was a truly dynamic period of production, with Italy making more than 250 films a year at the height of the industry: the truly absurd, such as Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground (where actress Mariangela Giordano has her breast munched off by her zombified son) could sit alongside the mesmerizingly trippy "All (...)

These short silent films for children have one theme in common: being different. How can you fit in this world if you feel as though you don’t belong? How to overcome differences? Various characters, such as a schoolgirl, a giant, a mouse, a square, and a cupcake, show us how they deal with the subject. Their moving and funny stories encourage reflexion and discussion.