Antonio Banderas will receive the Grand Honorary Award for his lifetime cinematic achievement and present ‘Autómata’, which he also stars in

Genre productions that have sparked interest in Cannes, Venice, Toronto or Sundance will be a part of the Sitges 2014 In Competition Official Fantàstic Selection. The Festival covers the extensive thematic and conceptual variety of present-day genre, highlighting debut films and up and coming artists alongside hallowed names.

The Sitges 2014 In Competition Official Fantàstic Selection includes Goodnight Mommy, from the budding Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, a film arriving from the Venice Film Festival where psychological horror begins when two twins start to suspect that their mother isn’t really their mother, but someone passing herself off as her. Spring is the new movie from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, also programmed at Sitges 2014 and that has just recently been a big hit at the Toronto Film Festival: in it, the team responsible for Resolution (2012) now explain the story of a young man who travels to a town in south Italy where he’ll have an affair with Louise who, as he’ll soon discover, conceals a secret that could destroy the story they’ve started to build. A film that was very well received at Cannes is the Danish When Animals Dream, by Jonas Alexander Arnby, that will be in Sitges to show us how a seventeen year old girl suffers from a degenerative disease that is slowly turning her into a lycanthrope. Disabled and confined to a wheelchair, during her transformation she’ll have to cope with her family and the town’s inhabitants, who will pursue her to put an end to her potential animalistic danger.

Still in the In Competition Official Fantàstic Selection, other outstanding films are: the Catalan production L’altra frontera, by André Cruz Shiraiwa; William Eubank’s The Signal; Quentin Dupieux’s Réalité; Takasi Miike’s Over Your Dead Body; the Spanish Pos eso, by Samuel Ortí Martí; Mike Flanagan’s Oculus;Jonas Govaerts’ Cub; Mike Cahill’s I Origins; Carter Smith’s Jamie Marks is Dead;Zik Hilditch’s These Final Hours; Jim Weedon’s Sword of Vengeance. These films have been added to the previously announced Aus yeux des vivents, by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury; Fabrize Du Welz’s Alleluia; David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows; Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook; Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and The Voices, by the famous comic book author Marjane Satrapi. The complete list will be published next week.

As for the Fantàstic Panorama Category, Sitges 2014 will include Let us Prey, by Irish Brian O’Malley; Louis Deluc’s Fièvre; Christopher Denham’s Preservation; Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon and Patrick Brice’s Creep. Titles that will be joiningAdrian García Bogliano’s Late Phases and Housebound from New Zealand, directed by Gerard Johnstone.

Fantàstic Panorama is also programming three movies of the type of films co-directed by different directors and presented in episodic format. On the one hand, the American V/H/S Viral, directed by Marcel Sarmiento, Nacho Vigalondo, Gregg Bishop, Todd Lincoln, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and ABC’s of Death 2, the eagerly awaited sequel of horror shorts done by 26 directors, including Álex de la Iglesia, Alexandre Bustillo, Sion Sono or Vincenzo Natali. And on the other, the Mexican México Bárbaro, directed byJorge Michel Grau, Iaac Ezban, Laurette Flores Born, Ulises Guzman, Edgar Nito, Lex Ortega, Gigi Saul Guerrero and Aaron Soto. This third film is also a part of the new category called Blood Window, which brings together genre movies produced in Latin America and is organized in association with the project by the same name at the Ventana Sur film market in Buenos Aires.

The Official Fantàstic Especials Category will be offering two especially outstanding screenings. The Spanish Autómata, directed by Gabe Ibáñez and starring Antonio Banderas, who will be at Sitges 2014 to receive the Grand Honorary Award for his lifetime cinematic achievement. We will also be screening Tusk, the new eagerly awaited production by Kevin Smith, who picked up the Award for Best Feature Film in 2011 for Red State.

The latest productions by prominent, hallowed names like David Cronenberg (Map to the Stars), Jean-Luc Godard (Adieu au langage), Kim Ki-duk (One on One) or Takashi Miike (The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji) as well as the opening with Jaume Balagueró’s eagerly awaited REC 4, or Álex de la Iglesia’s production Musarañas, spotlight Sitges 2014. An edition that will be presenting a Grand Honorary Award in recognition of his lifetime achievement to Roland Emmerich, the director who has destroyed the world more and more spectaculaly than anyone, and that will also feature the distinguished attendance of Pablo Helman, the genius or special effects on films by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.