Since taking over in 2022, NIFFF director Pierre-Yves Walder has made the festival’s socially tinged retrospective program a hallmark of his tenure. Rounding out a so-called trilogy that started with queer representation then followed with a gender focus that put the femme fatale and scream queen under the spotlight, this year’s retrospective will tackle class conflict in cheeky terms, putting the screws to those swells with a 20 film program titled Eat the Rich.
“Genre cinema has always treated questions of predation, exploitation and everyday brutality with such complexity,” says Walder, “which makes it so interesting to how this theme evolves over the course of film history.”
The far-ranging program tackles nearly a century worth of upper-class perfidy, beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s early-Soviet sci-fi “Aelita” from 1924 and running through…
