Hello, Adventure!

It’s a concept as old as cinema itself: films can be a way for audiences to feel like they’re taking part in the on-screen characters’ incredible adventures, which they’ll probably never get to experience in real life. This escapist function of the tenth muse is perhaps best observed in adventure films and thrillers, which are typically constructed around a series of more or less credible, picaresque events. After a period of being considered somewhat “inferior” (but currently experiencing a true renaissance), so-called New Adventure Cinema flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s thanks to mainstream filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis, just to name a few. In recent times, many directors who grew up on those cult favorites are eagerly drawing inspiration from them. You can see it in the “Stranger Things” phenomenon or in the way that “Top Gun: Maverick” drew huge crowds eager for extreme thrills, fondly remembering the original Tom Cruise blockbuster. Increasingly, this genre and its style are being reinvented by festival and arthouse filmmakers, obviously working with much smaller budgets and fewer resources. How are new generations of filmmakers rewriting the conventions of adventure cinema for arthouse film storylines? How do they deconstruct inherently sexist narrative patterns? Finally, what kind of adventures do their characters have? These are just some of the questions we’ll attempt to answer in this year’s new Mastercard OFF CAMERA section, so that we can shout along with the film characters, over and over: Hello, adventure!