The 30th Fantasia International Film Festival (July 16-August 2) opens on Thursday with the Canadian premiere of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Cannes premiere Her Private Hell and closes with the world premiere of Freaks Part II from Canadian filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. In total more than 125 features and 200 shorts will screen in Montreal.
Among the roster of panels and workshops are screenings of Jane Schoenbrun’s Cannes Un Certain Regard hit Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma; Myanmar’s first found footage film The Last Footage from Arkar Soe Oo, and The Glorious Dead, the sixth consecutive Fantasia world premiere from the Adams Family filmmaking team.
Screen spoke to Fantasia’s artistic director and director of international programming Mitch Davis about what to look out for, how the festival has evolved, and what genre films are saying about the world.
How has Fantasia evolved over three decades?
The first year was designed to be a one-time showcase [honouring] the Hong Kong New Wave films that were playing the festival circuit and bypassing Canadian festivals. When I came on as a programmer in 1997 the idea was to expand the focus and cover the last 12 to 18 months of genre filmmaking from around the world. There was an urgency to play these films because, particularly for European works and even US indies sometimes, they did not get distribution.
Now that genre has gone mainstream, how does this impact Fantasia and your filmmakers?
Companies used to be almost ashamed to handle horror. Now they have a period romance and say it’s also a genre film. A-list festivals are playing genre films to a degree that was never the case before. We play right before Venice, Locarno and Toronto, so there’s always going to be a certain amount of holding back. We can’t get everything.
If it’s a world premiere we can help the films get distribution. Companies really want to get into our line-up and in the last 10-15 years we’ve had so many acquisitions out of the festival. A24 acquired Undertone after a bidding war last summer. If you’re lucky enough to sign with an A24 or Neon, they eventise their releases and build an identity around them. Today so many films get distributed far too quickly before they have a chance to build an identity […] They get snapped up by a streaming platform, which is great, but the film gets buried underneath next week’s 30 titles.
What is this year’s selection saying about the world?
There’s a wide number of films that are dealing with themes of bodily autonomy, loss of agency, ecological devastation, economic destitution and class struggle, and definitely the fear of misuse of technology. Horror movies digest themes so well, but in a funny way you come out feeling quite good about yourself.
This has been the year of the creators with Obsession and Backrooms storming the box office. Any notable creators in the line-up?
We have the Canadian premiere of The Leader, Michael Gallagher’s true crime biopic about the Heaven’s Gate cult that premiered at Tribeca. He has millions of YouTube followers [Gallagher started on YouTube with his TotallySketch series]. The YouTube creators are brilliant storytellers and have grown up understanding structure and they can break apart visual and narrative rules in brilliant ways.
Which new filmmakers should we look out for?
Corrin Evans was an intimacy coordinator on a bunch of Ti West films and has directed a transgressive queer horror called Corpus [Cheval Noir]. Danish director Kasper Kalle has No Rest for The Wicked [Cheval Noir], which is a period queer vampire romance. There is an amazing number of queer genre stories. We have the French Cannes Midnight entry Jim Queen [Nicolas Athanw, Marco Nguyen, Animation Plus,]; Our Effed Up World from Australia [Alice Maio Mackay, Underground]; the comedy horror Bowels Of Hell from Brazil [Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner, Horizons], and many others.
Is there an overlap between selections that went through the Frontière Market organised by Fantasia?
Many, among them Hot Spot [Cheval Noir, starring Noomi Rapace] from the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska who directed The Lure. It’s about the dangers of future tech and is delirious, completely unclassifiable, her biggest production to date. We have the folk horror film Motherwitch [Horizon] from Minos Papas that premiered at Rotterdam, as well as Ancestral Beasts [Septentrion Shadows] from [Métis Indigenous filmmaker] Tim Riedel, and Mia’Kate Russell’sPenny Lane Is Dead that premiered in Adelaide.
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