Category: Film Festivals

Well that was an excellent week. Some vacations are a great way to disconnect from work while not being at all relaxing; this was one of those. I came back tired and a bit uncomfortable from a week of trying to navigate diabetes plus campus area quick food plus short blocks of time between movies. Informative on my current physical limits, though, and it was a shining Fantasia in terms of movies. We hope to go back next year, although in the process of going through this blog and tagging all my old Fantasia entries, I’ve found out how often I said that only to hit blockers. 30th anniversary, though!

I put together a ranked list of every feature I saw over on Letterboxd. For here, we’ll do some overview thoughts.

I was insane pleased to be able to see the new 4K restoration of Bullet in the Head, and it was everything I’d hoped. I think it’s been over 20 years since I’ve seen it last. My jaw still dropped at the savage pessimism. John Woo’s masterpiece.

And then I saw another masterpiece, Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Metatextural homage and critique of the Eurospy genre, drawing on fumetti extensively. It all makes for a very complex film. It made me gasp out loud at one point. So two five star movies at one festival? Success by any measure.

I was delightfully surprised by The Virgin of Quarry Lake, which cemented my belief that there’s something in Argentina that’s encouraging good film. Carrie meets Mean Girls in a horror film that uses the 1999 Argentinian economic crisis as a backdrop for a story about the fear of loss. Dog of God was not surprising: it’s exactly the profane Latvian historical rotoscoped epic that the trailer promises. Mother of Flies was much as I expected in tone — the Adams family is really dialing in on their groove — while also being a sublime experience. The audience in Theater Hall at Fantasia is really special; listening to the family talk about how much they love making movies together is amazing.

Points for every filmmaker doing their best work on a minuscule budget. Mother of Flies, The Serpent’s Skin (also with the Adams on the soundtrack!), A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — I come to Fantasia for these. Didn’t love all of them, am glad that there’s a way for these to find an audience.

Broadened my world with movies from three new to me countries: Latvia, Kazakhstan (the incredibly charming Sasyq), and Bolivia (Cielo, although the director wasn’t Bolivian). Coincidental but fun.

Great week and I can’t wait for next year.

Midway through my week in Montreal for Fantasia Festival, and boy is my ass tired. Losing weight is excellent, it’s just that I don’t have as much padding as I used to and Concordia University lecture hall chairs were not completely designed for two hour stretches. Worth it, though.

This is not my look at the full festival — that’ll come next week. Instead, I’ve been spending time thinking about why I cherish this festival so much.

Part of it is simply the continuity. My first Fantasia was 21 years ago — Chris and I drove up from Boston for the weekend. My second one was a couple of years later, and was the first one with S.; then for reasons which I’m sure were sane at the time I didn’t go again for like ten years. Then another eight years. After 2023, S. and I realized there was no reason not to go as often as yearly, and here we are again two years later.

I can look back on those previous visits and trace a lot of my life’s changes. Not just that this blog ran on Movable Type for the first one. I was gaming more the year we went from Montreal directly to Indianapolis for GenCon, which is not something that seems appealing right now even if it wasn’t exhausting. The differences between driving up from Boston and flying, which come to think of it is probably why I had those really big gaps. The ways I’m reacting to movies changed considerably during the pandemic.

So that’s one thing. Then there’s the audience: I am 100% sure that every single movie I see in the Henry F. Hall (except Jeruzalem) is benefiting from the enthusiasm of the audience. Every movie, no matter how bad, should be seen with audiences that are so happy to be there.

Finally, most importantly, there’s the risks. The movie industry is struggling in real and important ways; I can’t minimize the difficulties around original ideas, mid-budget movies that just don’t get made any more, and so on. All of that is real.

What’s also real, though, is that a majority of the movies I see here every year are taking big swings. I didn’t have to love Redux Redux last night to notice that it was made by a couple of brothers who just wanted to make a Terminator homage, so they grabbed a bunch of actors and some cheap locations and took their knowledge of the craft and put together two hours of film that made them happy. That’s fucking cool. I did love Sasyq, and it’s made by a Kazakhstan dude who’s played the ominous thug in a few Hollywood movies and TV shows and wanted to put his dream of a fairy tale on screen. I absolutely adored Dog of God, and it happened because another pair of irreverent brothers wanted to mythologize the story of a werewolf trial and realized they could get Latvian state funding for it as an experimental film. “Nobody cared what was in it as long as we had the logos in the right place at the beginning and the end of the movie.” Fuck yeah.

This festival reminds me that filmmakers are still finding ways to bring their weird little visions to life, with varying degrees of competency. This week is a celebration of parts of the human spirit that I will always love without reservation. Much of the time I get to see the directors come up before the movie and thank a rabidly excited audience; some of them have been here before, and some of them are experiencing this for the first time. How can I not be grateful for the opportunity to welcome them?

34 feature length movies and 12 shorts. Towards the end I was having a little bit of trouble connecting scenes into narratives so it’s probably just as well that my last two movies were a magic realism fable and a sociological essay. That was a very good time and I hope to do it again sooner than a decade from now.

Since I’m that kind of person, I made ranked lists for features and shorts. It was a pretty good year. Hippo is particularly good if you like thinking about conspiracies and cult dynamics and such. Baby Assassins 2 Babies has a martial arts fight scene that’s probably going to wind up in my top ten ever. I’m also particularly pleased that the Southeast Asian films I saw were more mature than some I’ve seen in previous years — it feels like the programmers have a solid handle on how to program the good stuff.

I’m a little bummed that I never found the Arrow Video booth, if in fact they had one. Vinegar Syndrome did but their releases aren’t quite as in sync with my tastes. I wanted to ask Arrow when their next Shaw Brothers set was coming out, too.

Gonna be a long flight back. Still all worth it.