Anton Bitel
Australian writer with a passion for horror, arthouse, the avant-garde and Asian cinema
Anton was born in Australia, and has lived in the UK since 1989. Proud father of twins, occasional Classicist and full-time caffeine junkie, he compensates for a general sense of disgruntlement by moping about in darkened screening rooms watching other people’s joys and sorrows. He seeks elusive vicarious thrills from all genres and non-genres, but tends to prefer anything extreme, odd, miserable or tawdry.
He is at home with horror, arthouse, the avant-garde and Asian cinema. A regular freelancer for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, VODzilla.co, SciFiNow, Senses of Cinema, Scene360 and EyeforFilm, he also guests on BBC World Service’s The Arts Hour, podcasts for Truth & Movies, and is a programmer for the London Korean Film Festival. He joined the Online Film Critics Society in 2007 and the London Film Critics’ Circle in 2009.
Anton has contributed writing to the books Directory of World Cinema: Britain 2 (Intellect), World Film Locations: Sydney (Intellect), Cattet & Forzani (Queensland Film Festival) and 30-Second Cinema (Ivy Press ). He has essays in the home release booklets for Arrow’s Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Audition (Takashi Miike, 2001), We Are The Flesh (Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2016), The Villainess (Jung Byung-Gil, 2017), and many more! He has served on juries for the inaugural Soho Horror Film Festival 2018 and 2019, Fantasporto 2019 and 2020, GrimmFest 2019, and Fractured Visions 2019.
Other posts by Anton Bitel
The Brazen (Bezkaunīgie)
Aik Karapetian’s latest psychodrama lets a family role-play their problems in an insect-infested old house in the woods, in a movie with flavours of Lars von Trier - from the Baltic Competition of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
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Embers
In Christian Cooke’s therapeutic drama, a sexual surrogate helps an incarcerated, deeply disturbed man break out of himself in order to make parole - dirty gem of a British drama premieres at the 31st edition of Raindance
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Warhol
Adam Ethan Crow’s real-time feature takes an ageing shock jock on a long dark night of the soul - British indie premieres at the 31st edition of the Raindance Film Festival
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Low Life
A YouTube star poses as underaged girls online and and then exposes predators, while juggling his very own relationship with a 16-year-old schoolgirl - American indie premieres at Raindance
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Father of Flies
British horror wilfully disorients viewers with a tightly structured script, and a little dash of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist - from Raindance
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The Invisible Man
Australian-American sci-fi horror adapted from the eponymous novel follows a woman who believes to be haunted by her late, abusive husband - now available on VoD
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The Grudge
The American director of The Eyes of my Mother and Piercing delivers a personal and inventive take on the highly conventionalised Japanese franchise - in cinemas Friday, January 24th
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