The 27th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival is poised to unbox its mix of discoveries, international festival favourites and fresh frights and fears for Canadian audiences from today in Montreal.
Artistic director Mitch Davis describes Pascal Plante’s opening film Red Rooms as one of the most provocative films of the year and “a very dark note to open the film festival on.”
Plante’s chiller tells the tale of a young woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer. It creeps into Montreal fresh from Karlovy Vary earlier this month as a North American premiere.
Fantasia will close with the world premiere of We Are Zombies, the latest project from Quebecois collective RKSS - François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, who came of age (covertly) in the dark of the Fantasia audience. Their film is based on the comic The Zombies that Ate the World (Les Zombies Qui Ont Mange Le Monde), and is set in a society where zombies or the “living-impaired” as they are known in the film, roam among us with no urge to eat flesh.
Team RKSS brought audiences Turbo Kid and Summer of ’84 and have built a cult following in Canada and beyond. “They’ve been coming to the festival since they were kids practically, they came with fake IDs,” Davis notes. “They started to make super DIY shorts that we played and quickly became festival audience favourites.”
With the SAG-AFTRA strike and the WGA action starting just days ahead of this year’s Fantasia, Nicolas Cage cancelled his scheduled appearance. The actor was expected July 22 to support the world premiere of director Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil and pick up Fantasia’s Cheval Noir career achievement award.
The show will go on and Cage will get his career achievement plaudit “further down the road,” Davis says. Adler and film producer Allan Ungar are expected to support the screening and the film is sold out regardless, says Davis.
Fantasia “supports the SAG-AFTRA strike emphatically” and backs the WGA action. ”We fully support the strike,” says Davis emphatially. ”It’s something that should have happened years ago when streamers began messing with residuals. Now with all the bad intentions related to AI and this horrible new trend of disappearing fresh productions within months to skip out of paying even those reduced residuals that are owed, it’s an existential urgency that demands a hard line be drawn and fair terms be negotiated with ironclad guarantees for everyone: For actors, writers, below the line workers. It really is now or never.”
The event boasts several feature debuts from alumni of the event, particularly short filmmakers making their first features, and from former participants in the Frontières industry forum. (This year’s Frontieres forum runs July 26-29.)
One is Booger, the feature debut of Mary Dauterman. Produced by Lexi Tannenholtz, it tells the tale of a young woman dealing with personal loss, inner-city loneliness and anxiety who slowly begins to turn into a cat. Dautermam’s short film Wakey Wakey was part of Fantasia’s Born of Women showcase a few years ago.
Auteur personal werewolf tales are trending, Davis says.
Jacqueline Castel’s first feature My Animal, about a young werewolf girl, unspooled during Sundance earlier this year and will debut in Canada during Fantasia with which she has form: Fantasia played early short films and My Animal was a Frontières project.
Also rostered is Larry Fessenden’s Blackout, a world premiere as one of several screenings that follow Red Rooms on opening night. Fessenden has been a Fantasia regular since 1998, supporting Canadian premieres of Habit, Wendigo and Depraved among others. Meanwhile Hippo is the feature directorial debut from writer director Mark Rapaport. His short Andronicus debuted at Fantasia. “It’s an agonisingly funny, super uncomfortable, personal black comedy about the coming of age of a pair of home-schooled step-siblings,” Davis says.
Jody Hill, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride saw an early cut and have boarded as executive producers through the trio’s Rough House Productions banner.
Crowd pleasers
“In terms of absolute crowd pleasers, we’re hosting the international premieres of both Tokyo Revengers sequels,” Davis says. “The first one successfully played two years ago at Fantasia.”
Also screening are the North American premieres of Malaysian filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu’s Cannes Critics’ Week grand prix winner Tiger Stripes and Stephan Castang’s tragicomic apocalyptic horror thriller Vincent Must Die.
Femme, the queer thriller that premiered in Berlinale’s Panorama, marks the directorial debut of Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping following their 2022 Bafta-nominated British short of the same name. Freeman will be in Montreal to support the screening.
Further anticipated titles include thriller Stay Online, written and directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Yeva Strelnikova, sci-fi drama Aporia from writer-director Jared Moshé, Ms Apocalypse, written and directed by South Korea’s Lim Sun-ae and What You Wish For, the sophomore feature thriller from writer-director-editor Nicholas Tomnay, whose credits include The Perfect Host.
Elsewhere, the festival is hosting a Korean tribute, celebrating 60 years of diplomatic relations between Canada and the Republic of Korea. In collaboration with the Korean Cultural Centre Canada and the Cinémathèque Québécoise, Fantasia will showcase six South Korean classics including folk horror Io Island (Ieodo), directed by Kim Ki-young, that helped to shape the revival of South Korea cinema in the 1990s.
And there is to be a Canadian Trailblazer award for Larry Kent. Having just turned 90, Kent is Canada’s first underground feature director, cited by David Cronenberg as “a heroic figure” and someone who made films “so ahead of their time” according to Atom Egoyan. Canadian International Pictures has restored the first three of his movies – The Bitter Ash, Sweet Substitute and When Tomorrow Dies – and Fantasia plans world premieres for the trio and will also show several other of his films, including his first and most recent features.
“Larry is one of the most individualistic storytellers in national film. His films always had a very strong sense of moral outrage, very strong social consciousness. The messages of his films were so confrontational, but yet compassionate. They always had difficult times getting proper distribution,” Davis notes.
Fantasia is taking place in Montreal from July 20 until August 9.
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