This October Grimmfest returns to Manchester’s Odeon Great Northern for four days of macabre mayhem from 7th to 10th October 2021. The event, which will be the festival’s thirteenth edition, will host over thirty screenings of a mixture of new and classic genre films. One film on the line-up is a film that has been generating a lot of buzz – Rob Jabbaz’ The Sadness.
With its slot on the Grimmfest bill, The Sadness continues its bid for festival domination. It has already screened at the likes of Fantasia and FrightFest, but will now hold the Grimmfest audience to ransom with its no holds barred tale of a devastating pandemic (with even more screenings to come). Set months into a global pandemic, the dangerous Alvin virus mutates, attacking the limbic system and dissolving that part of the brain that controls rage, aggression, and sexual desire. The result is messy apocalyptic carnage; the story follows a young couple who must work their way across the city to find one another. Along the way each of them encounters a never-ending gauntlet of dangerous situations, the viewer a powerless tourist through this visceral nightmare.
Although shot in Taiwan in Mandarin Chinese, The Sadness is actually written and directed by Canadian, Rob Jabbaz. Jabbaz has been living and working in Taiwan, and during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, set out to create his first feature film. Contrary to the version of Taiwan on screen, the real-life country was one of the best in the world at handling the pandemic, and so was the perfect location to conceive, write, shoot, and edit a movie, which is exactly what Jabbaz did.
We first met and spoke with Rob moments before The Sadness closed out August’s Arrow Video FrightFest. With our time with him on the media wall short, we had to track Rob down for a longer discussion and were able to catch up with him between festival screenings to find out more about The Sadness and what the filmmaker hopes to create next.
The Sadness screens at Grimmfest 2021 on 8th October 2021. Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.
