Rudi Fürstberger (RF) is one of the persons who are in charge of the movie selections shown at the Fantasy Filmfest. He has been doing this for about 5 years.

Matthias Strunz (MS) is the local organizer for Cologne. At times he helps selecting movies for the festival as he watches a lot of short movies.

Q: What is the Fantasy Filmfest all about? When did the initial idea start?

RF: It all started in Hamburg in 1987 when Rainer Stefan (managing director and programming) arranged the first trash punk evening on a small factory floor and invited a few people. He called it the Fantasy Filmfest. This evening turned out to be so successful that he decided to get together with a partner and to expand the whole thing. 1 to 3 years later he landed the first few mainstream studios and the Fantasy Filmfest started playing in two cities, Hamburg and Munich. Later it was expanded even further and started playing in 8 major German cities such as Cologne and Berlin.

Q: Is the audience increasing?

RF: The audience is constantly increasing. Surprisingly, the amount of females in our audience is increasing heavily. Horror-movies, fantasy-movies or Asian movies have become quite mainstream, so it is not only the die-hard fan base anymore watching these kind of movies.

Q: What is it that defines a fantasy movie?

RF: The classic fantasy movie is Lord of the Rings in my opinion. People generally think of Lord of the Ring when they hear the word fantasy film. By definition though a fantasy film is something like Avalon or Xena: Warrior Princess for example or any kind of picturizations of legends. But you should also keep in mind that it is just our festival’s name that is Fantasy Film fest. If you look at our poster’s tagline, it reads Science-Fiction, Horror and Thriller. We should also be adding Animation, Anime, Black Comedy, Gangster Film and Experimental Movies. Thank God the genres we offer are much diversified. So it is not all about fantasy movies as they barely exist.

Q: The Fantasy Film fest usually takes place in August. In 2003 you held the first Fantasy Filmfest Nights which since then have been held every year in March or April. Why did you choose to have an additional film festival?

RF: First of all, you just cannot watch enough Asian movies and horror movies throughout the year. Our fans asked for an additional screening night or two. The time span of a year between each festival is just too long for them. This was an appealing idea to us as we have been losing too many movies every year, because they were released in theatres too early. So we decided to put them together and screen them prior to the main festival during two nights.

Another major difference between the two festivals is that the movies we show at the Fantasy Filmfest Nights are very mainstream-like and not as diversified as the films we show at the main festival.

Q: Asian Cinema is growing more popular in the West. Why is it that the Western audience is becoming more and more enthusiastic about Asian movies? Have Asian movies changed or has the mainstream viewer become more open-minded towards them?

MS: Oh yes, they have grown very popular. About 5 years ago was the first time that we had all tickets sold-out for our Asian movies, which was never the case before. Before that we only had a few Asian films in our movie selection every year.

A major reason why so many people are coming to watch Asian films at the Fantasy Filmfest is that Asian movies have become quite rare in German mainstream theatres. So what people are basically missing is a different point of view. In comparison to Western movies, Asian movies are made very differently, telling very different stories. Their fantasy films contain a lot of ghost elements and are mostly extrasensory stories. People jumping high and flying over roofs have not been invented by The Matrix, but are traditional elements of Asian fantasy stories. This is what people want to see and they do not get to see it elsewhere besides on DVD. The fan base is constantly growing and in order to see such films in German theatres they have to wait for the film festivals.

Another reason for the growing popularity of Asian cinema is that people simply want to see different actors with a completely different appearance. They are tired of seeing Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone all the time.

Q: What are the major differences between the Asian films and the American films you are showing?

MS: The American movies we show are far more violent than our Asian films. Take the American slasher-genre for example. You will barely get to see such graphic violence in an Asian film. Of course there are exceptions, but you will never see movies like The Descent or The Devil’s Rejects coming from Asia in which gore is so graphically displayed. This genre serves a major part of our audiences though. Most tickets are bought for such kind of films and you have to keep in mind that all films are not rated which automatically gives them the 18 certificate.

Q: So how do Western movies compete?

RF: Most of our films are of British and American origin. Most genre movies are produced in the USA. Many of them are direct-to-video titles which you would usually never see on the big screen, which again is the reason why we are showing them.