Name: Simon Brand

Exhibitor: Strangest Things Film Club, Edinburgh

Fantasy Double Bill: Dragon Inn & Goodbye Dragon Inn

Screening: Heroic Purgatory (1970)

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Tell us about your organisation

Usually a film club which operates out of a living room, we’re doing a public screening for Scalarama!

Tell us about your Scalarama event this year

We’ll be screening Heroic Purgatory (1970), which is one of the greatest near-forgotten masterpieces of the Japanese New Wave. The films of it’s director, Yoshishige Yoshida, had been unavailable on home media in the UK until Arrow Video produced a limited edition set of three of his works. Heroic Purgatory is his most challenging and bizarre work; flitting between dreams, politics, death, light, architecture, building a hallucinatory and singular experience. It also features some of the most beautiful and strikingly-framed B&W cinematography you’ll ever see.

Tell us what Scalarama means to you

Bringing people who love to share cinema with those who love to experience it.

Why should people come to your event?

A chance to experience the work of a rarely-seen artist.

What Scalarama event(s) besides your own are you looking forward to?

From Edinburgh, we’re exited about the screening of Remake, Remix, Ripoff + Turkish Star Wars, which looks like a ton of fun. Also Cinetopia’s Pioneers & Preservers screening, which has a really interesting theme. From across the UK, the screening of Věra Chytilová’s Something Different seems like it’d be something different.

Anything else you want to tell people about?

Fuck Bombers never die.