FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: 5 SURE BETS

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The truth is, nothing is for sure at Fantasia, and that’s the whole point. Montreal’s genre film festival, now in its 15^th year, has been giving the people what they want for a decade and a half…

Seriously, Fantasia is a festival that has been fan-supported since the very beginning—for three weeks every summer, the kids (and grown-ups, too) have been forgoing splashy summer fun in the sun for the dank and dark confines of Concordia University’s cinemas for a freakshow of unfathomable proportions—and we mean that as the biggest compliment imaginable. Each year, dedicated programmers rifle through the world deep, dark cinema subconscious to create a programme of 100-odd feature films that represent the strangest and most bizarre, iconoclastic, genre-shattering cinema in the world.

The festival opened with a premiere of Kevin Smith’s aptly named foray into the horror genre, Red State, which premiered amidst controversy at Sundance in January, followed by a party with DJs for everyone—quite a stretch from the usual red-carpet ethos of some other film festivals down the way that we don’t care to mention. That’s kind of the point of Fantasia, it’s a festival with something for everyone, open to all, with absolutely no pretension, dedicated to real, true movie loving. That’s what makes it special.

Of course, with 21 days jam-packed with movies and events that range from the sublime to the ridiculously sublime, it can be hard to navigate the best of the fest—which is why we’ve laid out a few of the don’t miss events for the first days of the festival. That, and because we love every last minute of it.

#1: Belgian films have always been among the most striking selections of the fest, and Michael Roskam’s Bullhead is no exception. Promises to be harrowing.

#2: Burke and Hare, John Landis’ new film, stars Simpn Pegg and Andy Serkis (Gollum in the LOTR trilogy) in a screwball comedy about body-snatching in Victorian England. Part of a Lifetime Achievement Award for the famous Canadian director, who helmed The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London.

#3: Fans of South Korean genre cinema will have a chance to kneel at the altar of Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Suicide Club) when the festival screens his latest, Cold Fish, a black romantic comedy set in a fish store.

#4: Jamie Bell, Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton—a cracker U.K. “it” cast—add star muscle to Retreat, first-time director Carl Tibbetts’ horror movie about a vacation, an island…and a plague. Festival director Mitch Davis calls it the most visceral British horror film since The Descent, which is really saying something.

#5: The Theatre Bizarre: An anthology of shorts directed by some of modern horror cinema’smost controversial figures: Buddy Giovanazzo, Richard Stanley, and Montreal’s own Karim Hussain. Six films shot in four countries with identical production budgets and wildly different perversions: You get the idea.

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THE DETAILS

Fantasia Film Festival, July 14-August 7, 2011

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