• 
• 
• 

• 
• 

News

Attack the Block at the GC Film Festival

It’s an age-old question, posed by scientists and philosophers the world over: what would happen if ferocious aliens invaded a South London council estate?

Gold Coasters can watch the answer unfold first hand, as it will be inner city versus outer space when Attack the Block screens as the closing night film of this year’s Gold Coast Film Festival.
 
The sci-fi comedy has everything you’d expect from a director with a background like Joe Cornish’s, who starred in Hot Fuzz and the revered UK series The Adam and Joe Show. The film is set on Guy Fawkes Night, and sees the mugging of a nurse take a turn for the unexpected when it is cut short by an attack from a mysterious creature. The gang takes the body of the creature to drug-dealer Ron (Nick Frost – Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), but soon find that the true form of the creatures is more than they can handle with bats and switchblades.
 
For first time director Cornish, it was hugely vital to make his “nasty space bastards” truly scary, which meant that they had to slice and rend and tear and kill major and minor characters with those teeth and claws, to create a sense of jeopardy. “It was important to me that they were beasts”, says Cornish. “They’re all the things that the press and people call those kids, made into a monster. People call these kids monsters, they call them feral, they call them animalistic, they say they’ve got no morals or values and all they care about is territory and competitiveness. So what if there was a creature that really was like that, and then you pitted the kids against it? The aim was to bring out all the humanity and character in the kids by facing them off against something that genuinely was all those things.”
 
With the street gang trying to escape the alien infestation on mopeds, bicycles, and on foot, it gave Cornish a chance to flex muscles he’d been waiting to for a long time: his love of action cinema. From start to finish,Attack the Block is filled with visceral and thrilling action sequences. “I’m most at home when people stop talking and start running around and jumping over things and fighting things. I don’t think there’s enough movementand action in British cinema. I wanted to make a film that was about action, not talk.”Joe Cornish, Director.
 
Straight from its Australian premiere at the opening of Brisbane International Film Festival earlier this month, Attack the Block will be the last of the 31 films shown at the 2011 film festival, and is likely to be one of the most popular, according to festival director Casey Marshall Siemer. “This film has terrific buzz coming off its screenings in the USA and the UK, winning the audience award at the LA film festival and also playing well at several other international festivals including SXSW, Karlovy Vary, and Fantasia in Canada. The film is definitely one of the highlights of the program and I expect people will also enjoy the film after party at the new Gold Coast Hilton. It also is the perfect film to remind people that in 2012 the festival is moving and that the future of our festival is now linked with Supanova Pop Culture Expo with whom the GCFF has an exclusive partnership. Both events will run in April 2012 on the Gold Coast and I can assure film fest fans that they will not be disappointed with the program.”

© 2012 Gold Coast Film Festival. All rights reserved.