Edition 2017

In 1983 everybody thought we were completely nuts to start with a genre film festival. But we couldn’t care less. What we wanted was to share movies you couldn’t see anywhere else with our friends, movies that found themselves on the margins of the industry and were sometimes even looked down upon. But we knew better and we wanted to infect as many as possible with the fantastic virus. With already tens of thousands of visitors at the very first BIFFF, we quickly realized we had found a hole in the market. 35 years later we’re browsing through an old program brochure from 1993 and we’re surprised about what we find in there: Braindead, Fortress, Reservoir Dogs, Army of Darkness, Joe Dante’s Matinee… We think “Wow!” And then we remember how our friend Dario Argento was crawling on his hands and feet looking for a car bumper near the Botanique, how Wes Craven scribbled the idea for The People Under the Stairs on a napkin in a Brussels’ restaurant, how mad an already ambitious Luc Besson was when he didn’t win our Golden Raven with Le Dernier Combat or Peter Jackson who told us about an insane project, the adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. We could go on and on about so many others (John Landis, Terry Gilliam, Shynia Tsukamoto, Clive Barker, William Friedkin...). Anecdotes enough to saturate entire hard drives. Of course the world has changed in 2017. Cinema has changed. Fantastic film has finally gotten the recognition it deserved. But we keep on going. And with reason! The BIFFF has been an international reference for a long time and we’ll keep discovering and supporting the filmmakers of tomorrow. Just take a look at our program in 25 years and you’ll see that we were wrong to have been so modest.

In 1983 everybody thought we were completely nuts to start with a genre film festival. But we couldn’t care less. What we wanted was to share movies you couldn’t see anywhere else with our friends, movies that found themselves on the margins of the industry and were sometimes even looked down upon. But we knew better and we wanted to infect as many as possible with the fantastic virus. With already tens of thousands of visitors at the very first BIFFF, we quickly realized we had found a hole in the market. 35 years later we’re browsing through an old program brochure from 1993 and we’re surprised about what we find in there: Braindead, Fortress, Reservoir Dogs, Army of Darkness, Joe Dante’s Matinee… We think “Wow!” And then we remember how our friend Dario Argento was crawling on his hands and feet looking for a car bumper near the Botanique, how Wes Craven scribbled the idea for The People Under the Stairs on a napkin in a Brussels’ restaurant, how mad an already ambitious Luc Besson was when he didn’t win our Golden Raven with Le Dernier Combat or Peter Jackson who told us about an insane project, the adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. We could go on and on about so many others (John Landis, Terry Gilliam, Shynia Tsukamoto, Clive Barker, William Friedkin…). Anecdotes enough to saturate entire hard drives. Of course the world has changed in 2017. Cinema has changed. Fantastic film has finally gotten the recognition it deserved. But we keep on going. And with reason! The BIFFF has been an international reference for a long time and we’ll keep discovering and supporting the filmmakers of tomorrow. Just take a look at our program in 25 years and you’ll see that we were wrong to have been so modest.