Shot in a handheld, single take, a man in a blood-flecked t-shirt who looks like he has been through the wars staggers along a coastline in the light of dawn. His face illuminated, he stares in stunned awe at something beyond (and out of shot), before slowly closing his eyes in sweet surrender to whatever is out there.

This short promotional ident would run before every session at this year’s MOTELX, modulating the viewer’s own response to the light and shadow about to be projected on the screen – but it also captured my own feelings, coming from bedevilled Britain and emerging, bruised and battered, into the sun and warmth of Lisbon, ready and willing to submit myself to whatever audiovisual experiences the festival might throw at me.

In Portuguese, the “X” of “MOTELX” is pronounced “sheesh”, which is also, at least in English, an expression of surprise, disgust or amazement – all entirely appropriate reactions to horror (itself a genre named for a physical reaction, from the Latin for shivering, goosebumps, or hairs bristling and standing on end). Certainly this edition – the nineteenth – delivered fuel for all manner of responses, in a variety of genres.

…

.

Spoilt for choice

During my three-day stay I managed to see an influencer going full psycho in Quentin Dupieux’s darkly absurd The Piano Accident, love tabulated and tested in Dennis Iliadis’ twisty inverted romance Buzzheart, looping lost souls in Ryota Konda’s unsettling J-horror Missing Child Videotape (pictured below), an ageing if unretiring assassin in Min Kyu-dong’s vigilante action thriller The Old Woman with the Knife, two very different takes on female adolescence in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s delicately diffracted modern metacinematic fairytale The Ice Tower, and Julia Kowalski’s small-town scapegoating saga Her Will Be Done (pictured at the top of thie article), and the outer limits of the mother-son relationship in both Aleksandar Radivojević’s bloody Serbian satirical spirit war Karmadonna and Nuno Bernardo’s sci-fi-lite melodrama of murder and madness The Pianist.

Note the geographical diversity of those films which, though a small random sample from a programme of 130 titles, still hail variously from France, Greece, Serbia, Japan, South Korea, while two of the French films, Her Will Be Done and The Ice Tower, respectively mingle with Polish and German cultures. Meanwhile The Pianist is Portuguese, along with Jorge Cramez’s Sombras and Roberto Assis’s Crendices – Quando o Medo Vem das Crenças, at a festival that has always prided itself on promoting and platforming local produce. This is especially evident in the range of Portuguese shorts that precede the main features. Of the ones I managed to catch, depression and anxiety in Mafalda Jacob’s Resut, grief and guilt in Lucas de Lima’s Black Arroio, OCD and agoraphobia in Jonas Costa’s Inclosed, and creative restraint and repressed desire in Alfonso Lucas and Rodrigo Motty’s The Composer, are all articulated through the idioms of genre.

.

Flavours of Portugal

It is to be hoped that these and the other local short filmmakers will one day be able to secure funding to make their own features, and will get to screen those too at a future MotelX. Judging by the large numbers of people who were attending the beautiful Cinema São Jorge, and who also go to the festival’s older stepsister Fantasporto, Portugal certainly has an enthusiastic audience for horror and associated outlaw genres, The state should invest accordingly, and reap the rewards, both cultural and economic. After all, every country has its own dark, negative, weird or grotesque stories to tell, and such narratives always reveal uncomfortable, uncanny truths about the national identity which it is healthier not to keep buried.

I had a fantastic time at MOTELX, and was impressed by both the eclecticism and the internationalism of the programme. This was merely a brief dip into the 10-day event, but it left me, like that man in the promo, exhausted but full of awe. Unlike him, though, I was not able to close my eyes even once to the spectacles before me.