Handling The Undead, directed by Thea Hvistendahl, took the highest honors at this year’s Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) taking the festival’s H.R Giger “Narcisse” Prize and the Silver Méliès for best fantastic European feature. The film stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie and repurposes many Walking Dead tropes reframing the typical zombie movie as a reflection of family grief. “Full of frail, mortal feeling and overcast last-day imagery, Handling the Undead lingers coolly in the bones longer than many zombie films that offer more immediate, grisly gratification,” Variety’s Guy Lodge wrote. “It’s a living-dead nightmare with a brain and a heart, and, most importantly and indelibly, a soul.”
According to Variety reporting, accolades for the filmmakers in this year’s NIFFF created a lineup full of feminist perspectives and non-binary directors. All films for this year’s competition came from earning high marks from Sundance and Berlin, and have Swiss and US distribution secured. This year’s showing had record-breaking attendance, having over 35,000 admissions over 124 screenings in the nine-day event.
“We weren’t trying to impose a message,” says NIFFF chief Pierre-Yves Walder according to Variety. “And we didn’t go out looking for any particular type of film. Only, over the many months we spent programming, we came across so many powerful stories told by strong, feminist voices. And because genre cinema has traditionally been quite masculine, we found it important to underline this new generation of female talent.”
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