20.03.24, 20:30, Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986)

Like a rogue UFO, cult film festival Offscreen hijacks this Weird Wednesday edition with Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes. In this darkly comic political satire, convicted felon Scope exchanges his sentence to be conscripted as a space explorer. He lands on a planet where the humanoid inhabitants greet him and proclaim him a hero, but he soon discovers that his hosts are setting a very telegenic and bloody trap for him.

Polish sci-fi alchemist Piotr Szulkin was an artistic jack-of-all-trades with superhuman creativity. His imaginative works incorporated 20th-century philosophy and Polish medieval literature into speculative fiction, film noir and grotesque allegories. His parables about the machinations of power regularly faced censorship from the communist regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This final part of his Apocalypse Tetralogy — four existential tales, absurdist parables or fever dreams about the hostility of modern society and the evils of totalitarianism — remains a mawkish and chilly cry of despair for eternity.