Fresh off a hopeful deal for its workers, Fantasia Festival 2024 opens with an exciting plethora of mindbending genre films. The films we’re most looking forward to offer a unique perspective on visual storytelling and push filmmaking in bold narrative and/or technical directions.
Just in time for Christmas in July, director Alice Maio Mackay (T Blockers) is back with a new trans-led horror film, Carnage at Christmas, about a woman (Jeremy Moineau) returning to confront the ghosts that plague her hometown. Another Fantasia veteran, Jayro Bustamante, also makes a homecoming. Five years after his 2019 hit La Llorona, he brings a new offering, Rita, an escape thriller about a children’s revolt against the state. In this same vein of youthful rebellion, two young brothers will confront killer cultists in Hwang Wook’s film Mash Ville. Cults are hot right now and provide the backdrop for Lowell Dean’s Dark Match, a tale of a dark wrestling organization with sinister intent featuring famed wrestler Chris Jericho.
As the festival goes on, the boundaries between genres blur indefinitely. In Sander Maran’s The Chainsaws Were Singing, a killer’s pursuit of a couple leads the audience on a gorey musical adventure. Pratul Gaikwad offers an absurd twist on the Whodunit with Dead Dead Full Dead. As the first in a series of interconnected stories, Heavens: The Boy And His Robot merges classic science fiction and state-of-the-art technology to tell a family comedy about the environment at the end of Earth.
Jinanavin Veerapatra similarly mixes new technology with classic tales in his animated futuristic retelling of the Ramayana in Mantra Warrior: The Legend of The Eight Moons. There’s no space in Nick Johnson’s Sunburnt Unicorn. Instead, a young boy must cross a mythical desert to save his father. A delightful surprise of the festival is the restoration of Canadian director Gerald Potterton’s 1971 animated film Tiki Tiki, which recomposes Soviet animation into an apeish story about space and filmmaking.
Speaking of Tiki Tiki, The Fantasia Film Festival is always a fun place to see exceptional restorations of underseen films. This year is no exception, with a range of outstanding options. Vinegar Syndrome enhances Devil Times Five, Sean MacGregor’s 1974 cult classic about psychotic killer kids. Christina Hornisher’s 1973 sleazy tale of a Tinseltown murderer, Hollywood 90028, also gets a spotlight. That gives a whole new audience the opportunity to see this penetrating look at the underside of 70s Hollywood.
Stay tuned for extended remote coverage of these and other exciting cinematic adventures. The Fantasia Festival 2024 runs from July 18 to August 4 in Montreal, Québec.