2nd Annual Yellow Fever Independent Film Festival

The second Annual Yellow Fever Independent Film Festival kicked off last weekend at the Stormont Hotel in Belfast. Building on the format of last year’s successful event, this year saw an even bigger, better festival cramming a shed-load of film screenings and special events into just four days – that’s double the days last year’s festival ran for. As well as the impressive array of film screenings, there were also workshops, Q&A sessions with filmmakers, Cos-Play events, gaming facilities, special guests and a whole host of other exclusive treats.

If there is one thing the team behind Yellow Fever lack; ambition, determination and motivation aren’t it. Festival organiser and founder of Yellow Fever Productions, George Clarke once again reiterated throughout the weekend why he set up the event - to support and promote local independent filmmakers and provide them with a platform to showcase their work and get some recognition; as well as giving those in attendance the opportunity to see what other independent filmmakers from around the world are producing. The festival is modelled on the Freak Show Film Festival in Orlando. Kicking things off was a Zombie Aid Charity Walk – a first for Belfast – in which participants dressed as the living dead and shuffled their way towards the steps of local government buildings at Stormont, before chowing down on a Dead Meat BBQ. All money raised from the walk went to Make A Wish Foundation and The Billy Caldwell Foundation.


This year’s festival also played host to myriad premieres including Snow Blind, a visually stunning post-apocalyptic Western, and The Sky Has Fallen, a post-apocalyptic love story with visual and thematic nods to the likes of Hellraiser, City of the Living Dead and The Road. Proceedings took a lighter, though no less gory turn with the Irish premiere of zombie comedy George’s Intervention, a sweet and wacky US comedy – which also picked up the award for Best Film and Best Actress (Lynn Lowry). Director JT Seaton attended the festival and also screened his short film Nightshadows as part of the Gay of the Dead Film Night alongside Ian Powell’s striking art-house chiller Seeing Heaven, which tells of a young male escort who has terrifying visions of a mysterious masked stranger. Shot in the style of vivid European horror films from the Seventies, Seeing Heaven received the award for Best Cinematography.

Seeing Heaven

The shocks continued thick and fast on Saturday night, with the screening of Someone’s Knocking at the Door, a nasty, twisted and unforgettable horror in which a group of medical students experimenting with psychotropic drugs, are hunted by a demonically possessed pair of serial killers. Director Chad Ferrin picked up the award for Best Director this year. A plethora of short films were also screened, including the winner of Best Local Film, Erwin, an atmospheric and deranged film that resembles what From Hell would look like had it been set in Belfast after the apocalypse (it was directed by local filmmaker Stephen Petticrew, who obviously has a keen eye for darkly arresting visuals). 

Closing the festival was the hit Edinburgh Fringe comedy show How to Survive A Zombie Apocalypse. Taking the form of a seminar, introduced by the leading expert in his field, and ‘zombology’ guru, Dr Dale Seslick (Ben Muir - check out my interview with him here), How to Survive A Zombie Apocalypse is a hilarious one stop workshop to the world of zombie survival techniques. 


Submissions are now open for next year’s YFIFF. Click here to visit the website of Yellow Fever Productions and click here to support independent film makers.

Popular posts from this blog

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010)

Image
Dir. Andy de Emmony After placing his senile wife in a care home, retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) heads for the coast to revisit their ‘old haunts’, including the now out-of-season hotel they honeymooned in. By day he is stalked along the windswept beaches by a spectral figure dressed in white, and by night he is terrorised by strange sounds and someone, or something, attempting to enter his room… In the 2000s BBC4 attempted to reignite the old Ghost Story at Christmas tradition by adapting MR James’s A View from a Hill (2005) and Number 13 (2006). This series was seemingly short lived though, as their next outing wasn’t until 2010, and an unusual reinterpretation of James’s classic chiller Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad . While de Emmony’s direction captures the atmosphere and tone of James very well, this film differs significantly from other adaptations, including Jonathan Miller’s supremely unsettling 1968 take . Neil Cross’s screenplay only incorpo
Read more

Caveat (2020)

Image
Isaac, a brooding drifter suffering from memory loss, agrees to look after Olga, the niece of his acquaintance Moe. A troubled woman prone to bouts of catatonia, Olga lives in an old, ramshackle house on an isolated island in the middle of a dark lake. Isaac agrees to wear a chained harness that prevents him from going into certain rooms. He gradually comes to learn of the unsettling history of the house and the unquiet dead it harbours within its walls... Written and directed by Damian McCarthy,  Caveat  is steeped in the Gothic tradition. With distinct echoes of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, it is ripe with a lingering atmosphere of morbidity and decay. McCarthy's screenplay toys with themes such as psychological rot, dark family secrets, and the aftermath of unspeakable violence and cruelty. The story unfolds within the creepy confines of the lonely, mouldy house, with myriad forbidden rooms, hidden passageways and concealed bloody secrets. The house itself is cut off from civili
Read more

Otherworldly Encounters on Halloween

Image
Oíche Shamhna shona duit. To celebrate All Hallow’s Eve, my dear friend Marie – a writer and folklorist based in Missouri - has put together a podcast exploring first-hand paranormal experiences that took place on Halloween. The stories and accounts are shared from r/Paranormal , The Fairy Census , and the Dúchas Schools Collection (part of the National Folklore Collection UCD Digitization Project).  Between the stories, one of which is read by yours truly, Marie explores some of the history and folklore surrounding the traditions of Halloween, or Samhein, as it was known in Ireland where it originates from. An important festival in the ancient Celtic calendar to mark the end of summer, Samhein (Irish for November), is the night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead becomes thinnest, allowing souls of the deceased to pass through into our world and roam freely. The night we call Halloween in English, is Oíche Shamhna: literally Samhain (November) Eve. To listen t
Read more