Film Season: Psych Fest at FACT

Billed as a ‘pan-continental celebration of audio-futurists, operating at the bleeding edge of today’s psychedelic renaissance’, the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, or PsychFest for short, bring the likes of Super Furry Animals and The Horrors to North West in September. This year, in addition to the music, the festival team up with FACT to programme an accompanying film season that features an appropriately mind-melting selection of cinema.

On Wednesday 7th September, prepare to launch yourself into the thumping neon club scene of Tokyo with Gasper Noe’s extraordinary Enter The Void. The camera seductively swoops and swoons as it follows a recently killed American drug-dealer – whose spirit refuses to leave this earthly realm – on a psychedelic trip full of sex and violence.

We’re back on home soil a week later, with Ben Wheatley’s decidedly less high-flying, A Field in England screening on the 14th September. The Brit director behind Kill List and High-Rise brings us magic, mushrooms and madness in this small-scale, black and white Civil War piece about army deserters who leave the battlefield in search of an alehouse.

Finally, on Wednesday 21st September, we get some psychedelic women in Věra Chytilová’s Czech New Wave masterpiece, Daisies. The film follows two young women who, upon realising that “Everything’s going bad in this world” decide to “go bad” themselves.  Originally released in 1966, this playful and formally inventive film still feels thoroughly modern fifty years on.