Pierre-Yves Walder Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Ben Croll After two years of hybrid and online-only editions, the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival will fête its 21st year with a return to a fully on-site event, hosting four world premieres, and more than twice as many international premieres. Running July 1-9, the Swiss event will world premiere the absurdist “Jaws”-in-France riff “The Year of the Shark,” the Thai creature feature “Leio,” and the Japanese Yakuza thriller “Bad City.” Titles like the Toho-produced Kaiju flick “Shin Ultraman,” “Something in the Dirt” from U.S.

Ben Croll Director of “Die Hard,” “Predator” and “The Hunt for Red October,” John McTiernan will step into the limelight at this year’s Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF), presenting three of his films as guest of honor while serving on the festival jury.  If anything, the choice of honoree was obvious for NIFFF artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder, who calls McTiernan “the Pope of action cinema.” “The very idea of John McTiernan meeting our public will shape the history of our festival,” Walder says. “Because his films fed a shared love of movies, for us in Neuchatel and around the world.”

Ben Croll Upon taking the reins of the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) last year, incoming artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder marked his first edition with Scream Queer, a thematic retrospective that explored the thorny and thrillingly diverse forms of queer representation in genre fare. Now building on the success of that well-received program, the NIFFF director wanted to deliver a sequel of sorts. “We want to continue last year’s investigations and to take our thematic journeys a step further,” Walder explains. “You could say that this focus will continue to ask and answer the same questions with a slightly different emphasis.”

Ben Croll Heading into his first edition at the helm of the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF), artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder looked to land his white whale, setting his sights on a retrospective idea he’d dreamed up many years before.