The Fantasia International Film Festival begins its 21st Edition in Montreal today, and a good number of Screen Anarchists plan on being there. But the question of the hour is: How to cull down the three week genre extravaganza, featuring well over 100 features and other multimedia events, into a managable slice of the pie? While you are on your own for transport into the city and poutine recommendations, we have got you covered in the film selection department.
Let us walk you through what we are keen on seeing. Click through the gallery.
The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
As 2004's experimental and seminal, Mindgame inches towards an all-region BluRay, Yuasa Masaaki returns with this surreal, musical, crazy-romantic and idiosyncratically animated feature.
Set in Kyoto, in the fine cinematic tradition of 'one crazy night' storytelling, I simply cannot wait to have my senses melt down with the raw talent and high energy of Yuasa Masaaki. (Notably, he has a second feature also at the festival! A mermaid comedy called Lu Over The Wall.)
Lowlife
Set in South Central LA with a large cast of characters, Ryan Prows debut feature has organ harvesting, angry Luchadors, gun toting pregnant ladies, heroin addicts, ex-convicts, and heavy fire-arms all in play as the film structure told radically out of order further adds energy to the mix.
Lowlife will have its world premiere at the Fantasia, and seems to already be building some buzz. If you think this is the film this year that Mitch Davis is going to be enthusiastically gesticulating his arms about while pushing everyone into the Hall theatre to 'discover something new,' then you are probably right.
A Taxi Driver
Song Kang Ho. That is all you need to know. The delightful, exceptionally versatile Korean mega-star headlines this 1980 period piece as a cranky taxi driver who curses the Gwanju Uprising, and the country going to hell in a handbasket, even as he tries raise his young daughter alone in uncertain times.
One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who’s willing to pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city and back. The 'one big score' as a taxi fare looks to offer history, emotional drama, car chase action and all that thrilling mix that Korean cinema is so damn good at.
Mohawk
A thrilling New England period chase movie with the colour palette of John Boorman's Emerald Forest, and the character driven drama that was the highlight of Ted Geoghegan’s feature debut, We Are Still Here.
Mohawk is set in the global political landscape of the War of 1812, where in North America, the Americans, British and Indigenous peoples vastly rewrote the territory of 'The New World,' and was painful process was no stranger to war atrocity and tragedy.
Broken Sword Hero
It would seem that things have been relatively quiet coming out of Thailand lately. However, with the promise of a new action film starring rising star Buakaw Banchamek Thailand may be part of the conversation once again. Directed by Bin Bunluerit, known in his homeland for his comedies, it sounds like he has brought those comedic sensibilities and mixed them with the diverse martial arts history of the country that extends beyond just Muay Thai.
The filmmaking community out of Thailand has brought the world so many exciting and surprising films in recent years. Here is hoping that Broken Sword Hero is another one.
The Endless
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson have made quite an impact on the indie genre scene in the past few years with meta-found-footage mind-fuck Resolution and Lovecraftian love story, Spring.
Their latest feature The Endless is no exception. Both a continuation of their exploration of the fantastical and metaphysical, as well as their most personal film to date, The Endless asks why do we believe what we believe, and how does it change (or not change) our character. As I wrote in my review, it is “a meta-commentary of the nature of storytelling and a self-examination of the creative mind”, with terrific acting, cinematography and score, and not to be missed.
Shinjuku Swan II
Remember that year that Sion Sono put out three features? While the turtles (Love & Peace) and the schoolgirl massacres (Tag) seemed to get all the press, I fell in love with Sono's glossy studio gangster coming-of-age picture, Shinjuku Swan.
Ayano Gô reprises his role as 'hostess-scout,' Shiratori Tatsuhiko, but the action here moves from the eponymous entertainment district to seedier port city of Yokohama, where mega-talented Asano Tadanobu joins the cast as the local Yakuza boss. Expect more melodrama, fisticuffs and high-energy lessons-o- life in the well attired gutter.
The Little Hours
Nunsploitation is a genre near and dear to our hearts. And this little Sundance gem starring Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and John C. Reilly looks as irreverent, foul mouthed and saucy as the subject matter demands.
Set in the picturesque mountains of northern Italy, debauchery, witchcraft and other sins are the funny-business of Jeff Baena's follow-up to Life After Beth.
78/52
An entire documentary devoted to one scene from one film? Well, Hitchcock devoted one week out of his four week shooting schedule to film it, so we do not think 78/52’s ninety minute run time is nearly enough.
It has been near two years since snippets of Alexandre O. Philippe’s film 78/52, a documentary about the infamous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, screened during the Frontieres co production market at Fantasia.
While he talks to writers and filmmakers about the iconic scene, it was the copious amounts of discussion with film editors that immediately put it on everyone’s must-see lists.
Finally, coming up on two years since the first footage was shown in that small cinema in Montreal, we get to see the finished product as it has been burning up the festival circuit since January!
Multimedia Event: Paperbacks From Hell
Writer, critic, raconteur and snappy dresser Grady Hendrix delivers a mind-melting oral history of this wild and woolly world of Nazi leprechauns, skeleton doctors, killer crabs, killer jellyfish, and killer fetuses, featuring hair-raising readings, and tales of terrifying tots, tricycles, clowns, puppets, and heavy metal bands that were grist for the publishing mill for cheap supermarket and drugstore paperbacks for the 1970s and 1980s.
Fashionista
Simon Rumley (The Living And The Dead) returns with this Nicolas Roeg influenced mind-fuck that I leave it to the program guide to whip up excitement:
"Operating a vintage clothing store in Austin, Texas with her husband and planning to franchise, April's every move she is dictated by what to wear and how to acquire more of it. But her fixation with clothes soon proves to be her undoing, leading to a dangerous relationship with a mysterious and sadistic man (Eric Balfour) and a complete breakdown of reality."
All. In.
The Shaw Brothers' Bastard Swordsman on 35mm
In these parts, we all know that the cardinal rule of Fantasia is that you never skip King-Wei Chu's 35mm presentation of a classic Shaw Brothers film with the local audience.
This year, it is all about the Silkworm Kung Fu style in The Bastard Swordsman, a film made during the late Shaw era of the 1980s. This was when filmmakers were experimenting with the layering on copious amounts of analog special effects to freshen up the genre, but in the execution of such, made things absolutely undeniably bonkers.
Guaranteed to be more entertaining that the latest Marvel Spider-Man joint.
68 Kill
Sleazy, sweaty and sexy, the new film from Trent Haaga, the writer of Cheap Thrills, is a white trash neo-noir that sees a greedy small-town hooker and her boyfriend set out to rob her sugar daddy client of $68,000. Needless to say, it all goes pear-shaped and the body count quickly escalates. Word has been strong from SXSW, where it premiered.
Dead Shack
It seems that my only patriotic act this year will be watching Peter Ricq’s flick Dead Shack. The Canadian horror flick sounds promising. Smart and foul-mouthed kids fight off zombies and their fostering matriarch known only as ‘The Neighbor’. I am probably overplaying this by saying that a full description I have read sounds like John Hughes meets the early gore-hound years of Peter Jackson. Yes, if I were to deny myself this does of horrific Canadiana I could be branded as a traitor to my homeland. We shall see if it lives up to the hype.
Tilt
The promise of Kasra Farahani's Tilt is to explore how quickly the most familiar person in your life can become the most terrifying. A pretty superb value proposition for a film indeed. But what of execution?
Farahani has worked as a concept artist on some of the biggest Hollywood productions, from Jarhead to Munich to Miami Vice to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar, as well comic book films such as Spiderman 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy, so colour me curious as to what his character based horror will look like.
Jail Break
Always on the lookout for action cinema from the East we are at a point where it can come from anywhere within continental Asia and that is very exciting to me. No longer do we have to rely on the heavyweights like China/HK, Korea or Japan. The southeast region is proving they have just as much game as the rest of them and now Cambodia throws into the ring with Jimmy Henderson’s Jailbreak.
It comes with the promise of hand to hand combat in tight settings within the confines of a prison. Starring a national MMA champion Tharoth Sam and tapping into a community of stuntmen and stuntwomen I cannot wait to see what Cambodia brings when it’s ‘all out of gum’.
Town In A Lake
Fantasia over the years has had a particularly good eye when programming films from the Philippines. This year brings this dark (quite literally so) thriller with the most classic of premises: A young girl is murdered in a small town, turning it upside down.
Town In A Lake supposedly flirts with a more art-house execution and style over the usual gore or exploitation, and I am very fine with that notion.
The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always The Densest Shade Of Blue
OK, the title alone here arouses curiosity. A construction worker in Tokyo and a nurse who moonlights as a 'hostess' in a nightclub navigate the whole star-crossed lovers scenario in a city that exudes both isolation and possibility. Hope, love, awkwardness and silence make this one the dark horse (see what we did there) pick for 'weird Japanese comedy' of the fest this year.
Bushwick
Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's follow-up to Cooties, Bushwick provides an interesting, effective take on the idea of urban invasion, and is a particularly bleak glimpse into an apocalyptic struggle even more chilling given recent political developments.
A tale of tenacity set against a growing fascism that’s poisoning much of contemporary life, the film is both a fascinating exercise in style as well as a provocative and often chilling look into the abyss. Plus, loads of dead hipsters on screen for those into that sort of thing.
More Mainstream delights...
If you are a regular reader of this site, you are probably well aware of Luc Besson's Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Plents, the Charlize Theron action vehicle, Atomic Blonde, the 4K restoration of Dario Argento's Susperia, Terminator 2's 3D re-release, fictional-biopic Patti Cake$ and Larry Cohen's Q The Winged Serpent.
But the chance to see them in the Hall cinema with a very enthusiastic audience is what the festival offers with this more mainstream fare.