Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell will open and Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Freaks Part II will close the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal running July 16-August 2.
Daniel auteur Refn and Japan’s The Grudge director Takashi Shimizu will each collect Cheval Noir Career Achievement Awards during the festivities and the filmmakers’ latest works take their place among a line-up of more than 125 features.
Her Private Hell gets its Canadian premiere after first screening out of competition in Cannes and the dystopian slasher film stars Sophie Thatcher from Heretic. The world premiere of Freaks Part II follows Canadian filmmakers Lipovsky and Stein’s 2018 sci-fi indie Freaks and 2025 global smash Final Destination: Bloodlines as a woman and her daughter live on the lam and steer clear of the paramilitary police that wants to destroy them. Amanda Crew and Lorelei Olivia Mote star.
Fantasia will present Shimizu’s two most recent works: the world premiere of horror thriller Village Of Eight Gravestones, in which a young man with a dark family past visits the village of his late mother and encounters a private eye hired by hostile villagers as a killing spree unfolds; and the North American premiere of The Mouths, about university students who investigate a supposedly cursed tree in a cemetery.
Festival brass announced a wave of world premieres, including Montreal filmmaker Vincent Bonin-Arena’s Regards Parallèles, in which a car-jacking turns into an absurd and tragic journey; Bob Colaers’ Belgian action film Attack On Paradise, about a former convict who must protect his mother in an apartment block run by gangsters during a police raid; and Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open The Door, in which an architectural firm employee is drawn to a ritual at a woodland shrine run by elderly maidens.
Arkar Soe Oo directs Myanmar’s first found footage horror The Last Footage; Toronto filmmaker Ashlea Wessel brings her feature debut Junction Row, about a recovering addict who returns to a housing compound to rescue her friend from drug dealers and supernatural forces; and Permanent Damage from Seth A Smith, a surreal caper about an escaped convict battling a cruel landlord and stars Calem MacDonald, Olivia Scriven, and Stephen Dorff.
Selections include the North American premieres of Cannes Midnight animation and Queer adventure Jim Queen from Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen; Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue’s Annecy Contrechamp competition grand prix winner and Cannes Acid selection; and Louis Godbout’s Shanghai International Film Festival thriller La Place; as well as the Canadian premiere of Yeon Sang-ho’s Cannes Midnight premiere Colony.
In additional honours, US filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt will receive the 2026 Indie Maverick Award; Bruce McDonald the 2026 Canadian Trailblazer Award; and Quebecois filmmaker Robert Lepage and Vancouver-based actor Louise Portal the Denis-Héroux Award.
Click here for the first wave and here for the second wave announcements.
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