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Cannes: ‘Scherzo,’ ‘Witness,’ ‘Link’ Set For Cannes’ Blood Window

MADRID — Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s “Scherzo Diabolico,” Santiago Fernandez’s “Intimate Witness” and Javier Diment’s “The Rotten Link” will screen at Cannes’ 2nd Blood Window, which will open up from its Latin American base to take in Spain while boasting a strong Argentine flavor: Four of the five titles in the pix-in-post showcase have Argentine-directors, though Garcia Bogliano is Spain-born and now Mexico-based.

One high-profile event at this year’s Cannes Film Market, Blood Window unspools May 15-19, abandoning 2014’s midnight slot for 6 p.m. screenings.

As last-year, Blood Window, Ventana Sur’s Latin American Fantastic Film Market, will team with the world’s other top fantasy/genre fixtures – Austin, Sitges, Morbido, Bifan and Frontieres – to present new titles from Latin America’s burgeoning genre movie scene.

Produced by Andrea Quiroz at Salto de Fe Films, the Mexico-City label she heads up with Garcia Bogliano, “Scherzo” is represented for the U.S. by XYZ Films. It sees Garcia Bogliano, who from the age of 19 when he made “Rooms for Tourists” has delivered his own personal twists to a panoply of sub-genres, take on a kidnap imbroglio, here with a black comedy and even feminist skew as a separating and out-of-work accountant abducts a teen girl, who proves his worst nightmare. Pablo Guisa Koestinger and Tim League, at the Morbido Film Festival and Fantastic Fest, present.

Reteaming Fernandez and Buenos Aires-based Magma Cine after Fernandez’s debut, “The Second Death,” an atmospheric rural procedural-come-mystery chiller ethat stablished him as a scribe-turned-helmer to track, “Intimate Witness” marks a move away from horror to a thriller format. The story of the two brothers, Facundo, a powerful lawyer who’s having an affair with Violeta, brother Rafa’s girlfriend, who turns up dead in Rafa’s apartment. Facundo decides they have to get rid of the body: The night turns into a perverse game of spite, violence, revenge and death. San Sebastian director Jose Luis Rebordinos, who curates Ventana Sur’s Bloody Window Works in Progress, will talk an industry audience through the film. ,

One of 22 Works in Progress at November’s Mar del Plata Film Fest, “The Rotten Link” marks Diment’s second feature after laurelled debut “Memory of the Dead,” which Artsploitation Films released on DVD in the U.S. A “tragic fable,” said Diment, a regular Fernando Spiner co-scribe, the rural bloodbath dramedy turns on a village idiot who massacres his whole community. Lindsay Peters and Guy Delmonte, at Frontieres Intl. Co-production Market, will talk up “Link.”

Also in Cannes’ Blood Window lineup: Argentine Brian Maya’s “Santiso Report,” and “The Corpse of Ana Fritz.”

Introduced by Bifan’s Danny Sangho Rhee, the long-in-the-works “Santiso Report” centers on a reporter whose investigation of his daughter’s disappearance during an international rescue mission jeopardizes his sanity and the truth.

Word premiering at March’s South by Southwest, “The Corpse of Ana Fritz” begins with necrophilia, as two friends, one a mortician, take advantage of a beautiful and dead celebrity’s body. Switching to a survival thriller when the celeb, Ana Fritz, suddenly wakes up, “Corpse” marks the feature debut of Spain’s Hector Hernandez Vicens. Angel Sala and Mike Hostench, who head up the Sitges Catalonia Fantastic Fest, will present the envelope-pushing title.

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