Transgression is compelling. All filmmakers use transgressive acts to set fire to their stories but even shared taboos have cultural differences. Last weekend I had the very great pleasure of screening “NINA FOREVER” in both Kölne and Hamburg for the Fantasy Film Festival and was proudly told on numerous occasions that Germany has very strictly enforced laws on censorship, but quite contrary ones to America. “Here we have full nudity on tv constantly but you cannot show any violence, there you can kill but you mustn’t fuck”.

Now in its 29th year, FFF is Germany’s essential exploration of taboo busting filmmaking and takes the whole of the August to travel across 7 cities. Founder Rainer Stefan is a lifelong cineaste who first fell in love with movies through a Hammer Horror poster which terrified him long before he was old enough to see the film (which eventually lived up to promise of the poster and terrified him all over again). Rainer is the soul of the festival and it reflects him – passionate and precise but charming even oddly sweet. He retains both that wide-eye child’s view of horror films and an early teenager’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his passion. The festival is programmed by his colleague Frederike Dellert who for years was the outsider’s outsider, the girl who loved horror movies. She’s delighted that this status is changing, the festival’s audience is still predominantly male but the blood splattered fräuleins are on the rise. However Frederike also revels in how the spelling of her name means most people assume she’s a man, “I like to keep them in the dark for as long as I can” she admits with a grin.

Both Rainer and Frederike share a love of the verboten. The films that are too scary to watch, the stories that none of your peers want to engage with. But like jokes not all shocks translate. Sinking into the welcome embrace of a vast leather seat in a beautiful cinema in Köln I have the sudden panic that an audience craving otherwise censored gore is about to be very disappointed. “NINA FOREVER” is blood splattered and full of impossible and awful things happening in darkened rooms but alongside a lot of the FFF programme we seem like the outsider’s outsider.

Talking with Rainer on stage after the screening in Kölne.

What value labels? Thankfully “NINA FOREVER” has been received with open arms by the many festivals like FFF. Some of these get called “horror” some prefer “fantasy”, others go for “midnight” or “underground” or simply (and redundantly) “genre”. These words are noticeably not synonyms. In making our film the only taboos we set out to deliberately break were those of the 3 Act Structure, the Heroes Journey and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

After the screening Rainer asked our influences and I found myself talking about Lindsay Anderson and Richard Lester, Powell and Pressburger and that vital seam of surrealism that runs through British screen history but which tends to be overlooked. It is easy to forget that it was the peak of social realism that forged Dennis Potter, a writer determined to prove that for the British the only real taboo was the hateful yolk of conformity.