Fantasia International Film Festival will host first wave world premieres for the likes of Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious and Satoshi Miki’s Convenience Story and a career achievement award for John Woo at the upcoming in-person summer edition.
Set to run in Montreal from July 14-August 3, the event will include workshops, and launch events. Screenings and select events will take place in Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screens at Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinéma du Musée and McCord Museum. The full line-up will be unveiled in June.
Woo, whose credits include Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II and Red Cliff I and II, is currently filming Silent Night, his return to US filmmaking which stars Joel Kinnaman and Kid Cudi.
Glorious stars Ryan Kwanten and J.K. Simmons in the tale of a man locked in a rest stop bathroom where a mysterious figure talks to him from the adjacent stall, while Convenience Story came through Frontières Co-Production Market and marks the screenwriting debut of former Screen journalist Mark Schilling. Ryo Narita plays a man who stumbles into a store where he can find anything his heart desires. Miki’s sci-fi comedy What To Do With The Dead Kaiju? gets its Canadian premiere.
First wave world premieres include Rodrigo Gudiño’s The Breach, which centres on the chaos that ensues after a gruesome death in the forests of Northern Ontario and will launch the inaugural Septentrion Shadows programme curated by Carolyn Mauricette and dedicated to Canadian cinema that “captures the weird, the dangerous, things full of wonder, and (almost) everything in between”.
Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger tells of a woman who leaves her family quarantine to help a friend who’s suffering from terrible nightmares and discovers the bad dreams are contagious; while Mickey Reece’s Country Gold starring Ben Hall from Ninari as a music superstar on a night out in Nashville in 1994 before he gets cryogenically frozen; and Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac explores the world of Belgian serial killer The Butcher of Mons.
There are North American premieres for Takashi Miike’s trilogy finale The Mole Song: Final; Takashi Hirano’s Kappei; Kohei Yoshino’s Anime Supremacy!; and Yeom Ji-ho’s Next Door. The Netherlands’ Nico van den Brink’s Moloch gets its international premiere and there is a North American premiere for Legions by Argentina’s Fabian Forte. Among the Fantasia Underground selections are the world premieres of All Jacked Up And Full Of Worms by Alex Phillips, and Mitchell Stafiej’s The Diabetic.
The first titles in Camera Lucida dedicated to the intersection of genre and arthouse comprise North American premieres for Amanda Kramer’s Give Me Pity! and Daigo Matsui’s Just Remembering, as well as Canadian premieres for Tyler Taormina’s Happer’s Comet, Jonathan Davies’s Topology Of Sirens, Kramer’s Please Baby Please, and Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit Fast & Feel Love.
Docs From The Edge will feature the Canadian premiere of Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz and international premiere of The Pez Outlaw by Bryan Storkel and Amy Bandlien. Axis: Accent On Animation brings a Korean spotlight featuring the North American premiere of Hong Jun-pyo’s Chun Tae-Il: A Flame That Lives On, and there are Canadian premieres for Yutaro Kubo and Satomi Maiya’s The Girl From The Other Side and Alain Bidard’s Opal. Masaaki Yuasa’s Inu-Oh will also screen.
Additional first wave titles include Lena Dunham’s Sundance world premiere Sharp Stick, Andrew Semans’s Resurrection, Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, Yugo Sakamoto’s Baby Assassins, Véronique Jadin’s Employee Of The Month, Quentin Dupieux’s Incredible But True, On The Line by Kim Sun and Kim Gok, and Deadstream by Vanessa Winter and Joseph Winter.
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