Tag: fantasia
SATAN WANTS YOU Interview: Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams Talk Moral Panics
Moral panics have been with us as a species since time immemorial. From the persecution of European pagans at the end of the Roman empire in the Fourth Century, to the Salem witch trials in New England in the 17th...
Fantasia 2023 Review: THE TASTER, Harbinger of a Bold New Voice
Some time in the near future, the climate crisis, and the resulting extreme water and food shortages, have put Europe into a state of war. What little healthy land that remains lies along Danube Delta in Romania which is hotly...
Fantasia 2023 Review: APORIA Is Not Your Typical Time Traveller
Jared Moshé’s latest film, Aporia, is a fascinating paradox: A time travel story where the characters do not time travel. It is a sober, and quite emotional ‘what if’ and ‘if then’ take on parenting. The psychological cause and effect...
Friday One Sheet: LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
With its chunky font, matted border, and boxed head-shots, the Australian poster for Late Night With The Devil, has retro notes of period accuracy. This carries right down to the slightly larger type-setting of the actors' names hovering above the...
Fantasia 2023: Raising the Curtain on North America's Largest Genre Festival
The Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 20 to August 9 this year in Montreal. It's epic length is lovingly referred to by long time attendees as a 'summer camp for genre nerds.' Given that it runs for weeks...
Friday One Sheet: DEEP SEA 深海
Summer Cottages. Summer Dreams. Tian Xiaopeng's animated film has already played in its domestic Chinese market. It is currently touring on the global festival circuit, from Berlin to Tribeca to Neuchâtel, and soon, Fantasia. The international and festival poster is an...
Friday One Sheet: CHOROKBAM
Is the man smoking a cigarette while his ride waits, or is he about to be hit by a moving vehicle? This festival poster, designed by the director of the film, Yoon Seo-jin, for the Busan International Film Festival, captures...
Fantasia 2022 Review: EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH, A Pointed Workplace Comedy
Inès deserves a raise. She is the poster girl for EcoClean products. Literally. When she started at the company as a bright young thing, she was the model in the catalogue, the booth babe. It seems mostly men make the...
Friday One Sheet: LYNCH/OZ
Ladies & Gentlemen, put your hands together for this theatrical and smoky poster for Alexandre O. Phillipe's film theory documentary Lynch/Oz. Ostensibly, the film about David Lynch's obsession with the Wizard of Oz, and it certainly is that. Really though,...
Fantasia 2022 Review: CHOROKBAM, Green is the Loneliest Colour
I grew up what can charitably be descried as lower middle class. Like the central family Chorokbam essays, conversations almost always revolved around what things cost, going to and from work, and what we (or other people) are spending money...
Fantasia 2022 Review: WE MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD, With Neighbors Like These
In the not too distant future, the outside world is a profoundly unsafe place. It is more broken, more threatening that it is today. Note that things can always be worse. A family tensely walks through the woods, with frightened...
Fantasia 2022 Review: MY SMALL LAND, Empathy and Omotenashi
I have been told that Japan is a challenging country if you are not born there. But what if you grew up in Japan without being born there? We first meet high-school senior Sarya at a traditional Kurdish wedding...
Fantasia 2022 Review: POLARIS, A Gritty Bit of Original Myth-Making
There is magic at play in Kirsten Carthew's Polaris. It is set the year 2144. Earth has been ravaged and sent back to another ice age, one where the fish bleed green blood. Pockets of survivors eke out a violent...
Friday One Sheet: EL SEMBLANTE
The poster for Raúl Cerezo and Carlos Moriana's short film, El Semblante, has the character of an unearthed Renaissance-era tome. With its distressed Arabesque border design, it also feels like a moveable-type printed document, stamped with a red-inked Spanish Inquisition...
Short Cuts: Ethan Soo's SWEPT UNDER
Short Cuts is a new feature in which we chart a direct route to exciting genre shorts that deserve to cut through the clutter. Armed coups, military conflicts and the wars they can trigger are unquestionably rife with horror, a...
Friday One Sheet: POLARIS
This rough and tumble design for Kirsten Carthew's eco-action 'raised by bears' picture exudes all kinds of gritty energy. The muted high-grain image centers on lead Viva Lee in helmeted glory, screaming at the world. It drops the credit block...
Fantasia 2021 Review: SATOSHI KON, THE ILLUSIONIST
Watching Pascal-Alex Vincent's summation of Kon Satoshi's work and life and untimely death made me more than a little bit sad. Not because the film is a poor tribute or account of one of the leading lights of Japanese filmmaking,...
Fantasia 2021 Review: BABY, DON'T CRY Plays Rough and Tumble with Youth
Seventeen year old Baby leads a fairly structured life in a leafy, almost rural, Seattle suburb. She cares for her shut-in mother, to the point of weekly sponge-baths, has a domestic cleaning gig with one of her more affluent neighbours,...
Fantasia 2021 Review: TIN CAN, Industrial Grade Medical Nightmare Fuel
For many, a hospital visit is an exhausting house of horrors and bodily function humiliation, a prison on the road to wellness, where consent is as much implied as it is expected. Imagine your choices, and your suffering, at...
Fantasia 2021 Curtain Raiser: This is What We're Watching, so You Should Watch Them Too
That's a bit of a presumptive title there isn't it? I mean, seriously, there are so many great titles at this year's Fantasia, how do you choose? Another man's junk yadda yadda, right? The great thing is, Fantasia is three...
