Lonely Wolf’s Most Dangerous, Undomesticated Season – Film Daily
Enthrallium, leashed men, altar sex, curatorial risk
When Adrián Pérez set out to program Lonely Wolf International Film Festival’s sixth edition, he doubled down. After five years championing outsiders—building a virtual festival reaching roughly 3,500 viewers annually and logging over 10,000 streams—Pérez sifted through 987 submissions from 54 countries and selected the 43 that unsettled him most. “This is a very risky edition,” he says. “Lonely Wolf has never felt more authentically itself—a selection that doesn’t just represent our brand; it is our brand.”
The 2025 virtual premiere (December 18–31) pushes the festival’s “Home of Outsiders” ethos to its limit: ten Best Picture nominees that refuse harmony, 73 films demanding full attention. Albert Bullock’s Love Is Real stands as emblem—at 24, the London filmmaker crafted a 17-minute meditation on sexual identity that climaxes in altar sex, was pulled by YouTube after 900,000 views, swept five awards, and reframed intimacy as alienation, sex as search, connection as collision.
Provocative cinema exploring power and submission
A shared specter runs through the 2025 lineup—men on leashes, performing animality, surrendering power. Laura Calle’s Missing, Romi Banerjee’s Ghee (where “Enthrallium” erases conscious thought), and others independently landed on the same image, crystallizing anxieties around agency and submission. The features confirm curatorial nerve: Zhihui Long’s Where The Flowers Blooming transforms Cultural Revolution violence into a 128-minute meditation alongside Lasse Kissow’s Hólmganga—an 8th-century Danish Viking epic that took Best Feature Film—while documentaries like Rajesh PK’s Blu’s (in Academy Award contention) and Tom Dey’s JUMPMAN render the invisible visible.
Beyond the Official Selection
Chuck Harding’s Bella Lune – Blissful Escape weaponizes medical iconography—fetishized nurses as tormentors in psychological theater. Made for $200 and running four minutes, it’s bracingly ambitious: a music video that doubles as entertainment and exorcism.
Sound driven cinema revealing hidden economies
Elliott Forrest and Kelly Hall-Tompkins’s Face to Face: Forgotten Voices Heard turns Carnegie Hall’s acoustics into a democratizing amplifier for the sonically invisible. In 16 minutes, classical music becomes a Trojan horse smuggling socio-economic critique.
Maki Natalis’s Foreclosure literalizes spectacle anxiety through audacious necromancy, resurrecting Ragona’s 1964 The Last Man on Earth and reanimating it with a new neurological system—a metamodern palimpsest arguing archives are living tissue.
Konstantin Karpeev and Anatoliy Trofimov’s Frankly is a 71-second séance of millennial ennui: models confessing petty hatreds, dropping toilet water from seventeen stories. High-fashion tableaux oscillate with rooftop confessionals, capturing life under capitalist realism.
Unearths eerie urban cinema secrets
Steve Hunyi’s Garbage Rex descends into urban decay with a garbage collector as Virgil. Nineteen minutes of proof-of-concept layer Dickensian consciousness over neo-noir, mining space between documentary objectivity and participatory intervention.
Romi Banerjee’s Ghee understands horror as systematic erasure of agency disguised as hospitality. When Geet accepts Sanju Aunty’s lunch invitation, he enters pharmacological fascism where “Enthrallium” nullifies thought. At 26, Banerjee shows horror isn’t escape—it’s excavation.
Jonathan Moratal and Arthur Deschamps’s Immram modernizes Orphic descent, swapping lyre for clinical tech. Alexandre Donel plays a techno-scientific necromancer wielding “augmented autopsy” to interrogate the dead for three minutes, probing suicide’s epistemological void.
Three intimate visions of everyday humanity
Yulia Ruzmanova’s Kozlov Mitya, 81+ is a tender road movie where an octogenarian’s romantic quest becomes rebellion against gerontophobia and autocracy’s shadow. Channeling Varda, Ruzmanova refuses sanctification or infantilization; Mitya emerges gloriously human. With Ksenia Gapchenko and Anna Artemyeva as story editors and producers, the film documents ordinary humanity persisting under Putin’s grip—camera as benediction, not intrusion.
Ulisse Lendaro’s The Saint of Brooklyn collides hagiography with pugilistic cinéma vérité, refusing easy redemption. Lendaro crafts theological complexity: Chiara Dituri’s portrait oscillates between Bresson and Scorsese, examining masochistic devotion in pursuit of transcendence through brutality.
Tatiana Sokolova’s Mary Chris Max spins a deceptively simple premise—Christ-child myth colliding with noir—into an unnerving meditation on provisional families forged in desperation, as two men encounter an abandoned Mary in the Florida wilderness.
Trauma and caper cinema spark curiosity
Nick Conedera and Tom Pritchard’s My Father: The Healer excavates the extraordinary from intergenerational trauma. We watch Master Li’s QiGong origins alongside his son’s struggle to know a father who “always felt like an unreadable abyss.”
Raphael Oettel’s The Filthy Three hurls us into Nazi Germany’s twilight with a stylized caper-noir fusing Tarantino irreverence and Italian poliziotteschi. Three gentleman burglars humiliate the Reich’s elite, swapping priceless art for forgeries in zero-budget filmmaking at full throttle.
Viliam Poltikovič’s THE MYSTERY OF DEATH arrives as a radical epistemological intervention into Western culture’s terror of mortality. Over 95 minutes across four countries, interdisciplinary voices cohere into a landmark of transpersonal documentary cinema.
Explore eerie vistas through radical cinema
Poltikovič’s The Help of the Invisibles – Himalayan Oracles positions the camera as portal, crossing the veil between manifest and unmanifested. This 87-minute ethnographic meditation on Ladakhi trance possession doubles as indictment of Western epistemological poverty.
Leigh Tarrant’s The Presence of Snowgood excavates psychogeographical unease beneath England’s pastoral veneer. Kent–Sussex borderlands become a palimpsest of temporal disturbance, the detective’s search an archaeological dig through communal trauma.
Andre Semenza and Fernanda Lippi’s Turning to Birds – 200 Years of Evil Chill births a harrowing cli-fi fever dream. The culminating image—a naked figure ascending an electricity tower—engages “eschatological intimacy,” a paradoxical closeness to extinction.
Childhood fears fuel bold cinema journeys
Nick Benjamin’s Under returns us to childhood’s primal battleground beneath the bed. Pajama-clad soldiers don makeshift helmets, confronting the unheimlich in an existential skirmish with the void.
Iván David Nieves’s Victoria – Triumph of Puerto Rican Theater! animates Victoria Espinosa’s rise from Santurce’s margins to Puerto Rico’s first female theater director, transcending documentary into manifesto for endangered cultural legacies.
Ricardo Koller Morales’s Visions of You traps us in a Cassandra nightmare where prophecy is prison. Bruce’s precognition renders him passive, colonized by predetermined futures in a devastating inquiry into whether foreknowledge is agency or fatalism.
A taut thriller bending uneasy perceptions
Dale Loon and Alyssa-Rose Hunter’s Waking Conundrum transcends budget to deliver a labyrinthine thriller: a man wakes in a room with an endless ceiling, a potent metaphor for masculine obsolescence that understands dystopia interrogates power itself.
Aldéric Demay’s Zorrito compresses temporal devastation into 145 seconds. The coup de grâce—a Polaroid tumbling from a comic book—confirms a father’s presence, discovered too late to heal, only to complicate.
Screenplay Selection
Strange bodies awaken revolutionary love
Leslie Anne Lee crafts a Tolkienesque epic where the abject half-breed body becomes a site of transformation. Anda occupies Bhabha’s “third space”; the forbindelse soul-bond reads as Lacanian recognition; Dagsbrún’s vampirism embodies the Freudian death drive. Love emerges as revolutionary praxis—“Let me love you anyway” as romance and manifesto.
Robert Marshall Tartell’s domestic inferno turns a reptilian intruder into Lacanian objet petit a, exposing marital fissures. Mike’s complicit masculinity performs competence until the VISA statement detonates as dramatic irony. Gasoline and torch deliver hyperbolic catharsis—the American dream’s immolation preferable to dishonest cohabitation.
Brian Herskowitz resurrects Frankenstein through a modern psychological thriller. Laura Drummond becomes a crime protagonist of rare complexity—a rape survivor turned homicide detective whose case turns intimate. Gothic ritual wounds probe reproductive trauma; Catholic corruption filters Spotlight through Seven.
Fractured cinema invites dangerous awakenings
Herskowitz also drags Arthurian myth into fluorescent high-school purgatory. The psychoanalytic core is imposter syndrome: when Merlin—the ponytailed janitor with Windex—names Artie “Once and Future King,” the response is Sartrean nausea. Merlin stands part Gandalf, part Miyagi, part Gen-Z nihilist.
Ellen Rooney engineers a labyrinth rivaling United 93, excavating techno-skeptic eschatology. Cleveland’s fountain becomes axis mundi where trauma theology collides with anti-transhumanism. The medieval hatchet scene hits Cronenbergian transcendence as Erin amputates Ali’s arm to an ad-libbed prayer—“pray for me NOW.”
Tim Lott plunges into America’s underbelly where sex work and child exploitation entwine. Riley’s odyssey moves from trauma to precarious redemption; Gabriel’s shift from detective to avenger posits faith as violent intervention. Refusing resolution, Q ends as panhandler—another cycle, not victory.
Dystopian cinema meets modern anxieties
Kathleen Regan and Simon Barracchini’s Importers is a prescient dystopia on totalitarian pedagogy, orchestrating resistance across generations—Dead Poets Society refracted through 1984. The interrogation room crystallizes Kafka; the final “Dissolve” versus “Pass” converts bureaucracy into praxis.
Elizabeth Searle thrusts us into contemporary xenophobia with a searing thriller on race, gender, and justice. The “model minority” myth collapses as Sylvie Chin Flynn becomes a national lightning rod; the tripartite violence culminates with a pool cue—stereotype shattered, criminal made.
Joy E. Joseph builds a temporal labyrinth where AI devours reality. May 2nd functions as Derridean hauntology; nightmares are fragments of an aborted timeline. Formal play peaks with a glitching credit roll before the knockout—rewinding to the WGA strike, nightmare revealed as writing toward truth.
Silent cinema maps grief through myth
Marie Smalley’s Searching for Shadow devastates as grief’s psychogeography. A missing cat becomes Lacanian objet petit a; the search displaces a sister’s death witnessed in childhood. Children’s books reaching publication suggest catharsis without false consolation.
Smith, Perez, and Rothblatt construct a theological cosmology around Cleveland’s fountain as axis mundi. Drawing on Sephirot, nephilim lore, and Catholic exorcism, Ben’s journey remains liminal. The abrupt ending lets failure stand—Allison dies, the world transforms, Ben leaves Earth.
Lynn H. Elliott crafts a liminal bildungsroman where the Crossingway is Howell Evans’s crucible—monomyth for a TikTok generation and a sharp psychogeographical excavation. Indigenous mythologies stand coequal, challenging Western rationalism without appropriation.
Contemporary cinema roars with defiant voices
Carla B. Boone writes a contemporary Count of Monte Cristo refracted through racial capitalism and music-industry predation. Retribution arrives via a grandmother with a red wig and smoking gun. Rapper Kieon watches his work monetized while creators deliver mail and sell drugs—raw, furious American cinema.
The 2025 Lonely Wolf International Film Festival premieres virtually December 18–31. After six years building a fully digital festival—pairing prestige with accessibility and nurturing a 650+ five-star “Wolfpack”—this edition locks into identity. Not a collection, but a conversation. Not safety, but curation. In a landscape where “independent” often means studio-adjacent, Lonely Wolf remains sanctuary for uncompromising voices. These films aren’t chasing franchises; they’re howls. Lonely Wolf makes sure they’re heard.
For complete program information and festival access, visit www.lonelywolffilmfest.com
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