Fantasporto Chiefs Beatriz Pacheco Pereira and Mário Dorminsky on Spotting Rising Talent in the World of Fantasy
variety.comLeo Barraclough International Features Editor Fantasporto, the Oporto Intl. Film Festival, kicked off Friday in Portugal’s Porto — city famed for its elegant Romanesque cathedral, a bookstore that inspired “Harry Potter,” and the heady alcoholic drink — with an eclectic mix of titles but an emphasis on fantasy films.
Typifying the broad tastes of the festival chiefs, film critics Beatriz Pacheco Pereira and Mário Dorminsky, Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand’s satire “Testament” opened the event’s 44th edition at Batalha Centro de Cinema, and Chinese fantasy epic “Creation of Gods I: Kingdom of Storms,” directed by Wuershan, closes it.
Although Pacheco Pereira and Dorminsky, who compete with the Brussels Intl. Fantastic Film Festival and Sitges for fantasy films in Europe, know they can’t please everyone in Porto with their selection “what is really important to us is whether the audiences applaud the films,” Dorminsky says. “This is not a job for us.
It is a pleasure.” Pacheco Pereira says that one of their achievements is they have “a good eye for spotting talent,” selecting the first films by David Lynch, James Cameron, David Cronenberg, Peter Jackson, Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, Denis Villeneuve and Danny Boyle, among many others.
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