Like its recent predecessors, this year’s 29th edition of Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal will reflect a genre film scene whose output is “built on existential dread and the anxiety of a world that’s changing for the worse,” says festival artistic director Mitch Davis.
Davis, who also serves as Fantasia’s director of international programming, notes that many of the more than 125 features and 200-plus shorts screening at the July 16 – August 3 event “deal in really provocative ways with powerlessness, the loss of self and the loss of bodily autonomy.”
Those themes are approached from different directions and with different tones in the festival’s 13-title Cheval Noir international competition line-up.
Among the five world premieres screening in the section – all with their makers in attendance – are Terrestrial, a US comedy thriller from Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink, The Woman, a South Korean thriller from Hwang Wook, winner of the best director award at last year’s Fantasia for Mash Ville, and Mother Of Flies, a horror drama from US daughter-father-mother writer-directors Zelda Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser. The Adams Family feature, says Davis, is a festival highlight that “deals directly with the mother and father’s experience surviving cancer” and will be the fifth consecutive project from the film-making team to get its world premiere at Fantasia.
On Fantasia’s lighter side are some of the 13 projects in this year’s Animation Plus section. Highlights of the line-up include a world premiere for Japanese avant-garde anime feature Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat In Dark [[In Dark, not In The Dark]], a sequel, from the directing team known as t.o.L., to 2003 Fantasia award winner Tamala 2010, and episodes of anime series Nyaight Of The Living Cat, executive produced by past Fantasia honouree Takashi Miike.
Capping the animation section as the festival’s closing night presentation will be Fixed, a raunchy canine comedy for Netflix from Genndy Tartakovsky, the Moscow-born, US-based filmmaker who will be one of the recipients of this year’s Fantasia Cheval Noir Career Achievement awards.
Elsewhere in its nine feature sections, Fantasia will take in what Davis describes as “genre adjacent” fare, most notably in the form of opening night presentation Eddington, Ari Aster’s neo-western fresh from its Cannes competition debut. Having shot his previous feature Beau Is Afraid in Montreal, Aster has a connection to Fantasia’s home city, Davis explains, and his new film “fits in with the spirit of the festival.”
Fantasia will also shine a light on a film renaissance in Kazakhstan, with director Adilkhan Yerzhanov attending the world premiere, in the Selection 2025 strand, of his horror thriller Kazakh Scary Tales. Joining her director in Canada will be star Anna Starchenko, an award winner at last year’s festival for her performance in Yerzhanov’s Steppenwolf.
Special events set for this year’s edition include a session in which Danny Elfman will discuss his musical score for festival animated short Bullet Time and an artist talk with filmmaker and Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman.
Genre veteran Kaufman is also set to be presented with Fantasia’s Indie Maverick award and will appear on screen in Occupy Cannes, a documentary about Troma, directed by daughter Lily-Hayes Kaufman, getting its world premiere in the Documentaries From The Edge section.
A frequent Fantasia attendee since the festival’s second edition in 1997, Kaufman stands as “an inspirational figure,” says Davis. “Troma have overcome so many obstacles to get their films made in the most impossible circumstances.”
Existential dread notwithstanding, the genre sector appears to be on something of a hot streak.
“It’s an incredible time,” confirms Davis, “first in terms of the purity of expression, but then also commercially. The studio juggernauts that used to work have never cost more and been less guaranteed to perform. Whereas with a small genre title the concept is the star and the audiences are already there to do the publicity for you.”
As a result, Davis goes on, “everybody is financing genre films and the number of things being made is staggering.”
For Fantasia, the boom has meant a dramatic increase in the volume of submitted projects and some tough decisions about what to select and what to pass up.
“It’s a good problem to have I suppose,” admits the Montreal festival’s artistic director. “We end up having to pass on loads of films that we adore but just can’t accommodate, which is hard for us.”
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