Cycles
MAIN COMPETITION
This year, for the fourth time, you will award the Audience Award for the best film in the Octopus Film Festival Main Competition! It features the best and most imaginative genre films from around the world that have not previously been shown in Polish cinemas.
In the Moonlight
Although Tomasz Beksiński is primarily associated with music, his contribution to Polish film culture is beyond measure. Beksiński was the author of cult-favorite translations and numerous film-related columns, and he would even read dialogue lists live during VHS screenings—a practice recreated by Jan P. Matuszyński in The Last Family. As part of this year’s edition of Octopus, we will revisit Beksiński’s cinematic side projects. The event will feature four films translated by him, recordings from Tomasz Beksiński’s home VHS archive, and the documentary From the Inside. To top it all off, we’ll invite you to a gothic dance party!
Our special guests will include voice-over artists Jarosław Łukomski, Maciej Gudowski, and Jacek Brzostyński—who decades ago read Beksiński’s translations—as well as Wiesław Weiss, editor-in-chief of Teraz Rock. The event is curated by Tomasz Szwan and organized in cooperation with the Historical Museum in Sanok.
Octopus Shorts
In short films, we look for exactly the same things as in feature-length cinema: creativity, artistic courage, madness, and a unique blend of genre inspirations with an original idea.
Little Octopuses
Little Octopuses are genre films for the youngest audiences! Octopus isn’t just about hardcore genre cinema—this year, we’ve once again prepared the Little Octopuses section to prove that genre indoctrination can start from the earliest age!
VHS Hell
VHS Hell is a recurring series of screenings of B-movies dug up from the lowest shelves of neighborhood video rental stores. This year, we’re presenting two titles with live voice-over narration.
Midnight Movies
Too brilliant not to show; too wild to watch in daylight. Midnight screenings return for the eighth edition of Octopus!
Retrospective: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Few contemporary filmmakers are as consistent as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Since their debut, they have paid tribute to Italian genre cinema of the 1970s—from giallo to spaghetti westerns. Their films often reject traditional narrative in favor of visual and auditory references, playful editing, and associative madness. The result is a series of creative reinterpretations of genres we all love.
Never Again
There are films we revisit often and with great pleasure, eager to immerse ourselves once more in the worlds their creators have built. These are not those films. Never Again is a section devoted to heavy, unpleasant, depressing, and traumatizing cinema. Some we saw far too early; others we put off until later. They all have one thing in common—we don’t want to watch them again. But they’re so good, you have to see them at least once.
Classics in 4K
The return of genre cinema masterpieces in razor-sharp, remastered 4K versions is always a cause for celebration—especially on the big screen!
Retrospective: Satoshi Kon
He inspired Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and Guillermo del Toro, and his films continue to fascinate new generations of viewers. Although Satoshi Kon passed away far too soon, he left behind four remarkable feature films that showcase the extraordinary world of this Japanese director and manga artist. For the Satoshi Kon retrospective, we will present three of them—Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, and his cult debut Perfect Blue.
Conansploitation
When Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared before the world as Conan in 1982 and hypnotized audiences with his muscles, producers and distributors leapt into action—producers commissioned films similar to Conan the Barbarian, while distributors dug through their libraries for anything that could be repackaged to ride the wave and sell more tickets. The result was a flood of films on both sides of the Atlantic (because the Italians, of course, wouldn’t miss such an opportunity!) that can only be described as “Conansploitation”—cheaper and lacking Arnold, but still packed with bulging biceps and repulsive monsters in desperate need of decapitation.
Retrospective: Brian Trenchard-Smith
A favorite director of Quentin Tarantino, a co-creator of the Ozploitation movement, and a legend of genre cinema—Brian Trenchard-Smith is the focus of our retrospective and the recipient of the Inked Tentacle Award at the eighth edition of the Octopus Film Festival! In just over two weeks, Brian Trenchard-Smith will be at Octopus to meet Polish audiences and accept the award for lifetime achievement, while we present five titles from his rich filmography: Dead-End Drive-In, Stunt Rock, BMX Bandits, The Siege of Firebase Gloria, and, of course, Turkey Shoot.
Monsters in the Closet
Monsters in the Closet return with more genre-bending hybrids—this time with ⅔ of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: The Doom Generation and Nowhere. Araki, a leading figure of American New Queer Cinema, unleashes his anarchic fantasies in these two films, blending loose narratives with absurdist dialogue and needle drops from 1990s alternative music icons. To accompany the screenings, equally defiant and creative drag artists Ali Urwał and Maszyna will deliver performances that will launch you into the stratosphere before you even sink into your seat. The section is curated by Marcin Zwolan.
FULL MOON
The legend of American genre cinema will be with us in spirit this year—specifically through three films from its vast library that didn’t make it into last year’s program. You’ll follow the further misadventures of a killer turned Christmas treat (Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust), take a hit of the forbidden herb (Bad Seed), and visit a civilization lost in time (The Primevals).
Documentaries
Taking a break from genre madness, we invite you to a solid serving of documentaries that tell fascinating stories about those very genre crazinesses. This year, we’ll watch three love letters to strange, over-the-top, and absolutely unique cinema: So Unreal (Polish premiere!), where Debbie Harry guides us through the history of cyberpunk cinema; Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror (Polish premiere!), a sequined, musical tribute to the most iconic cult film of all cult films; and Scala!!! or the incredibly weird rise and fall of the wildest cinema and how it shaped a mixed generation of weirdos and misfits, about the legendary London cinema Scala.
Fell from the Moon…? Strange Films by Great Directors
This section began at a café table. Arek asked: “Hey, what are the weirdest films by the greatest masters of cinema…?” We started tossing around titles and quickly realized there are quite a few. On one hand, you’ve got these impeccable, consistent filmographies; on the other—foreign bodies, odd glitches, curveballs, and surprises coming in from the left field. Films that seemingly “don’t fit.” Works that stick out, trip you up, and make you ask the great masters of cinema, “What on earth were you thinking?”
In this section, we’ll share five such titles, each with original graphics by Arek and original descriptions by Michał. Boxcar Bertha is a reminder that even when Martin Scorsese was doing a quick gig for Roger Corman, he knew how to sneak a crucifixion scene into a gangster ballad. 1941 is a giant comedy stew made from whatever Steven Spielberg happened to have in his fridge at the time. David Lynch’s Dune is the only big-budget blockbuster in the surrealist master’s filmography, while One from the Heart is a hyper-personal musical shot in a studio-built Vegas that sank Francis Ford Coppola. The crown jewel of our cycle will be the almost-unknown-in-Poland O.C. and Stiggs, in which Robert Altman decided to deconstruct the horny-teen comedy and ended up making one of the most subversive films of the 1980s.
(Arkadiusz Hapka and Michał Oleszczyk)