When the boldest fiction pales beside the newsfeed and beauty no longer saves the world, there is only one answer: turn the dial to maximum.

Excess and extravagance, deadpan laughter and surrealist macabre, biting social satire and the absurdity of today: in turbulent times infected with post-irony and post-truth, reality has compromised itself—realism alone is no longer enough to address it. Slowness and lifelikeness have given way to the grotesque—the shortest path between society’s pressure points, resonating with modernity like nothing else. Through genre deviations and fearless invention, the grotesque drags truth and essence to the surface.

The programme Grotesque as a Response traces the striking trend toward amplified grotesque elements in films of the past five years, capturing cinema’s reaction to the contradictions and conflicts of our era, and finding their aesthetic equivalents in absurdism and critically charged eccentricity.

This section highlights a shift in both the narratives and the language of contemporary cinema towards the fractured, eerie fairy tale, the cautionary black comedy, the illogical parable, and the fantasy riddled with gaps of meaning and imagery. This shift arises from a sense of powerlessness before the state of the world, and of the urge to overcome it. The six films in the programme invite viewers to closely examine this new cinematic response to our times.

Katerina Beloglazova