Tag: fantasia

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...

Friday One Sheet: BABY, DON'T CRY

This week, in anticipation of the Fantasia Film Festival coming in August, we have the key art for Jesse Dvorak and Zita Bai's troubled teenager coming-of-age drama, with a dollop of magical realism, Baby, Don't Cry. Be it hand painted, or...

THE CLEANER Exclusive: New Concept Art Emerges Ahead of EFM

Back in 2017 one of my favorite pitches from the Frontieres coproduction market was for Jan van Gorkum's horror comedy The Cleaner.    In the Dutch production The Cleaner, a dark comedy and horror flick, the central character Barry, a...

Friday One Sheet: SPOOR

Today we have a stark, and 'uncanny valley' type of key art out of Turkey. Agnieszka Holland's much lauded Polish crime film, Pokot (Trophy), took a fair number of awards and plaudits on the festival circuit including Berlin's Silver Bear,...

Fantasia 2017: Watch the Trailer for TRANSMISSION, A 'Lynchian Brexit' Short Film

Varun Raman and Tom Hancock's short film Transmission, what they have dubbed a 'Lynchian Brexit' themed short film, will have its international premiere at the Fantasia Int'l Film Festival on July 30th in the Celluloid Experiments 2017 program. The filmmakers were...

Frontières 2017: Call For Submissions in Now Open!

Filmmakers of the World, the time has come to get your aspiring new film projects in for Frontières@Fantasia in Montreal this July and your work-in-progress projects to Frontières Goes to Cannes in May.    Some of the best places to...

Fantasia 2016 Interview: Bobby Miller on THE MASTER CLEANSE

Of all the films that I've seen at Fantasia this year, The Master Cleanse from writer-director Bobby Miller ranks among the weirdest and most unique. I have to admit that the first 20 minutes of the film didn't draw me...