Screen Cultures – New Documentary Case Studies on the Marginal

Giada Mazzoleni (Film Producer) Fulci for Fake

The 2019 documentary Fulci for Fake explores the complexities of how to shape a biographical documentary dedicated to the life of a director who has never told the truth.

Lucio Fulci directed more than 40 films during his life, crossing all film genres, but is now recognized as the ‘Godfather of Gore’, with titles cited by internationally renowned directors such as Guillermo Del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi and Eli Roth.

Fulci’s incredible production profile has always hidden the complexity of his life, a life he enjoyed playing with, always giving new versions of himself and his career. Precisely for this reason, the construction of this documentary wanted to respect the plurality and complexity of his persona, by constructing a narrative framework that paid homage to the director by mixing and altering of points of view on the research behind his life.

Fulci for Fake received its world premiere at Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia in 2019. Giada Mazzoleni’s talk will discuss the development of the documentary, as well as screening an extract from the project.

Professor Xavier Mendik (BCU) New Territories and Diverse Fears: The Quiet Revolution project.  

The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film is a 2019 practice as research documentary project completed between BCU, the University of British Columbia and the UK based film distributor 101 Films. This project resulted in the commissioning of two documentary productions which consider how key social, political and cultural tensions within differing Canadian territories have shaped horror film traditions from the 1960s until the present day. The first documentary project (released across the UK in July 2019) considered how tensions within 1960s and 70s Quebecois culture influenced a new range of controversial horror productions and subgenres. The second documentary in The Quiet Revolution project (released across the UK in October 2019) analyzed territorial shifts in cinema production from Quebec to other regions such as Toronto and Vancouver during the 1990s. This section of the project also used recent horror film releases to challenge established Canadian national cinema conceptions around indigeneity, diaspora and immigration. Xavier Mendik’s talk will discuss the development of The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film, as well as screening an extract from the second documentary production.

About the speakers:

Giada Mazzoleni is a film producer and film educator based both in Italy and the UK. In Italy, she worked for two years as a development producer alongside the producer Franco Bocca Gelsi (Fame Chimica, Fuga dal call center, L’ultimo pastore), as well as working for prestigious Milanese film companies that included hFilm, Enormous Film, Filmgood, NCN, 360FX, The Blink Fish and Cattleya. In 2018 she moved permanently to Birmingham, UK where she started Paguro Film, which produced the short film Moths to a Flame (2018) and Fulci for Fake (2019).  As an educator, Giada Mazzoleni has taught at the Civic School of Cinema in Milan. She is now working with the Vice Consul to launch the Birmingham Italian Film Festival in winter 2019.

Xavier Mendik is Professor of Cult Cinema Studies at Birmingham City University, from where he also runs the Cine-Excess International Film Festival (www.cine-excess.co.uk).  He is the author/editor/co-editor of nine volumes on cult cinema traditions, including Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress: The Golden Age of Italian Cult Cinema (2015), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (2012), The Cult Film Reader (2008) and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000).  He has also completed twelve documentaries on cult film traditions, most recently The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film (2019).