This year’s annual exuberant celebration of the genre cinema was about to be clouded over with some concerning developments at its very start. Almost on the festival’s eve, the news broke out about the festival’s staff going on strike with demands for fairer terms.
Although the crisis was apparently resolved through satisfactory negotiation just in time not to disrupt the event, this together with a relatively smaller share of established names on the line-up could have raised alarms on the path ahead. After all, the downfall of Montreal’s A-list World Film Festival is still fresh in memories. For all these warning signs, the quality of selections had shown, to the faithful festival spectators’ delight, little sign of suffering, and the program provided ample opportunities for the audience to discover and catch up with emerging voices.
On the veteran’s list, Nobuhiro Yamashita had the most prolific presence at the festival, with two solo-directed films and one co-directed animated feature. The diversity of themes and moods of these three films would not necessarily please the proponents of the auteurist cinema, but viewed together the films testify to the Japanese director’s versatility as well as his resourcefulness in making use of limited sets and characters. In Swimming in a Sand Pool, which is adapted from a play written by a teenager, Yamashita despite keeping most of the action in a limited space manages to expand this theatrical stage into a cinematic space.
The main set of the film is a large empty pool which the female students are assigned to clean of sand, while through their exchanges they give expression to their personal feelings about being a young woman, their hopes to bend the gendered rules and expectations, as well as their frustrations. The film takes advantage of its theatrical origins to keep the audience constantly in the company of its female protagonists, and in so doing maintains and consolidates its feminine point of view all along. The men are almost visually absent; they are either evoked in the girls’ conversation or make a presence by causing noise in the adjoining baseball field or kicking up the sand which, to the girls’ dismay, lands in the empty pool. Even on the sole occasion of their direct interaction with one of the girls, the boys are pictured only from behind.
The dominant mood in Yamashita’s other live-action feature, Confession is as different from
the serenity of his high school melodrama as it gets. A two-hander for the most part, Confession’s plot remains confined to a remote cabin in the mountain, where through an atmosphere of ever-mounting suspicion and paranoia which culminates into nightmarish horror, the truth regarding a crime in the past is unraveled. This retrospection involves only a scary use of flashbacks, which despite picturing a crime scene contrasts the darkness dominating the rest of the film in their calmness and vibrance. The unhinged characters and scenes of axe-wielding and door-shattering in Confession can be perceived as a nod to Shining. However, the film’s gimmicky twists hold within generic boundaries and mar the psychological complexity it aspires to build as the fulcrum of its narrative.
The titular character of Ghost Cat Anzu, co-directed by Yamashita and Yôko Kuno, has almost nothing to do with the dark, fiendish, or vengeful figure of ‘Kaidan’ (Japanese horror). This feline-shaped, human-sized fellow rather acts more like a comic character, partly by virtue of his incongruity. All the same, his fantastic associations also facilitate the journey taken by the film’s heroine – a girl who’s left in the care of her grandfather, because of her dad being in hock to creditors- into the underworld in search of her departed mother. Through this journey, the traditional Japanese characters of horror, the gods, and monsters of the underworld are invited to the film. Though still meant to be looked menacing, the grotesque features of these entities are blunted and do not undermine the mellow charm of the film for its target audience. Adding true excitement to this hitherto calm film, the journey serves to remind the young protagonist of the irretrievability of the past and to help her come to terms with the loss of her mother. With a balanced dose of mild humour and pathos, the film creates a delightful watching experience, while showing little aspiration to reach the same heights as the works of masters of anime.
Meanwhile on earth, Jérémy Clapin’s new film after his widely celebrated animated feature also engages with the notion of loss. The film revolves around a girl who is emotionally scarred when his astronaut brother goes missing during a mission and still holds hopes for his return. Clapin brings in the sci-fi elements in a rather delicate and ambiguous way. The girl starts hearing the voices of aliens who claim to have his brothers and will return them in exchange for her help with finding bodies that can host them. The alleged aliens are never pictured, except when they presumably embody their victims, with their presence suggested only by their host’s odd behaviour. Together with the ambiguous ways in which the disappearances of the victims are pictured, this makes us wonder if the whole affair is real or just a figment of the girl’s troubled mind. It is somehow left to the spectator how to perceive the protagonist; a deluded killer or a devoted sister. The director’s use of animation to picture and accompany the mental conversations between the brother and the sister contributes to this ambiguous presentation, though it could also be narratively pretexted on the girl’s artistic talents, which her traumatic experience kept her from pursuing.
In the short Korean film, Memory, also dealing with the notion of acceptance of loss, the director Jang Hawon, uses the sci-fi format in a limited way and merely as a tool necessitated by the premise of the film. The only apparent feature that distinguishes film’s futuristic world from our time is the availability of a technology that makes clones of deceased people based on the memories of their closest ones. The heroine of the film, still traumatised by feeling compelled to consent to take his moribund dad off the life-supporting machine, seeks to make up for that by using this technology in order to bring her dad, or better to say her own vision of him, back in flesh. Using a structure that flows between the present and the past, the film in its simple narrative touchingly makes us ponder over the questions of memories and materiality and how they define our emotional bonds with our dearest ones.
Rumbustious and pulsating with juvenile energy, Wake Up the newest offering of the Quebecois trio collectively credited as RKSS stages a slasher with ‘human hunt’ inflection inside a department store. A motley group of young activists sneak inside to exercise their act of vandalism almost like a game, as they shoot paints with their paintballs and record themselves. They are oblivious to the plights of the cantankerous burly security guard who has already been reprimanded and unpleasant shifts for earlier mistakes. To hide their identities, the youngsters put on animal-shaped masks which have associations with their proclaimed agenda, but also position themselves as substitutes, even if troublesome, games for the hunt-loving security who instead of practicing his hobby is forced to stay indoors. As a somehow parodic take on the genre which still delivers its quota of violent scenes, Wake Up playfully employs and subverts generic formulas such as ‘final girl’. The film seems to humanise the killer and poke fun at his self-righteous victims, even though on the whole it avoids taking sides and simply celebrates a chilling survival game in a different type of playground. The technically formidable scene showing the activists doused with florescent liquid and shimmering while surrounded by pitch darkness encapsulates the simultaneously jubilant and dark mood of the film. Wake Up is the type of film that will be best experienced in a movie theatre packed with hardcore genre fans such as Fantasia patrons. At the festival screening of the film the spectators were indiscriminately cheering for both the hunter and the hunted for their resourcefulness in outfoxing and foiling each other; maybe like the security guy they were also expressing their annoyance with the activists’ immature fanaticism.
Bail Bail (Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers), the story of two roommates who engage in a wild chase in order to save themselves from being evicted and frustrate the landlord’s chicanery, is exemplary of Quebecois cinema and its orientation towards the local community’s concerns. The director playfully exploits the generic elements of action and comedy, to build a briskly-paced and delightful piece out of a topical struggle.
Addressing pathologies of modern Korean society with deadpan humour, The Tenants (Yoon Eunkyoung) limits itself to the subjective experience of a young man who inhabits a small cell of this urban structure. To avoid eviction- a common threat across big cities across the world- by taking advantage of some bylaw, he chooses to rent out part of his small apartment, but from the get-go, things take an absurdist turn. Man’s world gradually turns into one of paranoia and in his escalating angst he finds his attempts to flee the big city working in the opposite and further pushing him into the furthest corners of his cramped unit. The film makes use of horror impulses in a restrained, more Kafkaesque manner and the director’s choices to set the right tone for the film – static shots and wide-angle lenses, paired with black and white photography – should give one pause before attributing the film’s merits to its literary source.
With Rita, the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante puts forth a compelling case where fantastic elements are inseparably woven into the fabrics of a true story. The eponymous character of the film, a girl subjected to domestic violence is delivered to a state-run all-female shelter, only to experience the draconian and exploitive conditions imposed by its corrupt guardians. From the beginning, the unusual costumes of the girls and also a vision of residents who are later suggested to be ghosts shatter the assumed boundaries of reality and imagination without rhyme or reason. The presence of fantasy cannot simply be put down to a metaphorical presentation or assumed as a reflection of the protagonist’s wild imagination. Rather it flows from the tradition of magical realism, which as the director maintained is not just an artistic flourish, but a certain experience and view of life. By abiding by this tradition, Rita shows that it is not necessary to convey a real-life story through a realistic or naturalistic lens. As the film demonstrates, the fantastic imagery simply adds a poetical layer that doesn’t detract from the darkness of the story but can make it more lyrically touching.
In The Soul Eater, the French filmmakers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury hybridise a detective story with supernatural trappings and create a hell-on-earth in a small French village as the background for a personal vendetta saga. Investigating mysterious disappearances of children, the inspector of the film finds himself confronted with grisly and inexplicable murders and inevitably in the company of a female colleague who is in charge of the latter case. As per familiar tropes, the initial antagonism and lack of trust give way to an alliance between the two characters who both have personal traumas in their pasts. The film builds a compact network of intrigue, operating by manipulation and parochialism which justifiably turns victims into unsuspected perpetrators of manslaughter in their own rights. Even though the supernatural beings are eventually divulged- as expected- as a red herring and a convenient cover for criminals, the exposed truth is no less eerie and chilling. With a layer of mystery staying around the main protagonists till the end, the film’s uncanny element remains anything but fully resolved.
A far more bitter and nihilistic soul whose only raison-d’être remains revenging annihilation of his family drives forth the narrative of Steppenwolf, the new film by the rising talent of Kazakh cinema, Adilkhan Yerzhanov. In common with The Soul Eater, the film’s plot is concocted around child trafficking. The unsympathetic (anti)hero of Yerzhanov’s film is also paired on his vindictive trek with a female companion; in this case, she is a mother who is seeking her kidnapped child. The relationship between the two however remains strained until the very end, due to the woman’s emotional difficulties on one hand and a streak of sadism and misogyny in the man’s behaviour on the other, though this caddish attitude seems to be the man’s unprincipled method of provoking the woman to break out of her shell and exert herself. Opening and closing with a direct homage to The Searchers, Yerzhanov’s film unmistakably demonstrates the influence of Westerns in setting its dynamic and violent drama in the vastness of the desert. Bestrewn with burning and destroyed cars this western-like landscape also evokes an apocalyptic mood, which is in tune with the scenes of mayhem and ambush at the beginning of the film. The sombre tone of the film, the profusion of the violence, and a main character who never balks at pulling the trigger or shows the slightest sign of leniency all bring the film closer to the realm of Spaghetti westerns than to that of classic ones. Though the film drips with violence, the director mostly opts to keep its gory effects out of the frame. Together with some effects that defy everyday reality- like the woman walking through cross-fires unscathed, or the man singlehandedly taking on the notorious gang without a full-fledged action choreography- this enshrouds the film with an air of otherworldliness.
Where the mountain women sing (Juefang Zhang), apparently a pilot short for an upcoming feature film project, puts a self-reflexive twist on the rape-revenge narrative. On the pretext of the story of a female filmmaker and her cameraman who make a documentary about a matriarchal society in which men are turned into brainless tools of pleasure, the film puts together different image textures and points of view corresponding to fictional film and documentary. In doing so it steers clear from the visual blandness of found footage-style mockumentaries. The result is a witty little film that addresses women’s position in the film industry within its jocular approach and without overreaching itself.
Feminist approaches to the theme of revenge were featured in at least two more short films of this year’s program. In Berta, the Spanish Lucía Forner Segarra offers her feminist take on the rape-and-revenge narrative by reformulating it in psychological terms, even though she still somehow manages to satisfy the prerequisite spectacle of blood. The director who during a panel of female filmmakers at the festival voiced her displeasure with the typical treatment of rape scenes in this subgenre, visually eliminates the rape part altogether and simply focuses on the revenge section. In keeping with this approach, her camera mostly stays with its female protagonist, especially during the part where she refreshes the kidnapped rapist’s memory of the incident in the past. As given away by its title, Wanna die wanna kill(Jeong Jaehee) pictures the transformation of a suicidal girl into an angel of vengeance, as she finds herself face to face with a serial killer who feigns joining her in a double suicide. Here murder – although excused on self-defense- becomes a cathartic tool for the girl to pour out the withheld sentiments that have already driven her down a self-destructive path and ironically revives in her the desire to live. Murder as a defensive response to manipulation and a natural outcome of it, albeit in a more comic register, is present in another Korean short film, Meat(lov)er (Kyung Seo Park). In this film, a girl who is cajoled by her lover into consuming meat takes an immense liking to it, to the extent that she cannot keep herself from taking a bite from her lover’s flesh when she’s asked to satisfy her deepest desire.
In his new film Párvulos, The Mexican fervent champion of genre cinema Isaac Ezban borrows from traditions of zombie flicks, post-apocalyptic films, and survival pictures to spin a gloomy tale of family solidarity against inside and outside threats. The family set-up constitutes a context for the filmmaker to humanise the conventionally vilified zombies – here victims of the trial treatment of a pandemic, to echo events of recent memory- and add more complexity to their antagonism with humans. Ezban’s choice of highly-desaturated images – though not fully black and white and still containing fully coloured objects- augments the bleakness of this fictive world where in a reversal of familial roles children have to fend for their parents and engage in violent and heinous acts. Notwithstanding its dominant mood, Párvulos is not fully bereft of lighter moments- like the scene where the children try to re-educate their zombified parents- even though this tone switch might not be to everybody’s taste.
The Beast Within (Alexander J. Farrel) another family-centred genre film shows instead this institution in crisis. The impressive opening scene picturing the dilapidated building in which the family has taken refuge reveals a dark shadow is already hanging over them. The unusual conditions of the dad do not escape the attention of the young girl of the film, and her mother’s frequent outings with the fur-coat-donning dad and a pig in a cage give us an early suspicion that his ailment is of a lycanthropic nature. This is confirmed midway through the film, while the rest of it follows how the girl confronts this condition. As the director himself confirmed, the supernatural story is a thinly veiled symbolic rendition of domestic violence. Adherence to this symbolic function seems to have constrained the film and for all its accomplishment in building a mystery-laden sense of malaise, it eventually rushes into playing the same predictable generic conventions.
This is contrary to the trajectory taken by Infinite Summer, where the turns narrative defy generic expectations. Already having built a reputation for his atypical and more cerebral approach to the genre, Miguel Llansó delivers with his new film yet another hard-to-classify oddity. The main futuristic component of the film’s fictive world is a vapour dispensing mask that in tandem with a relaxation app promises an otherworldly experience of serenity in the manner of psychedelic drugs. Linking this contraption to a shady company which can be traced to the Far East and bringing in an Interpol officer to examine the case, creates some false signals about the plot moving in the direction of a cybercrime investigation. The film’s centre point, on the other hand, remains its almost self-inhibited young heroine who along the way opens herself to new experiences. The director acknowledged having a hard time writing a psychological-driven script for the first time and it probably shows itself in the earlier parts of the film. But as the mask is introduced into the plot he is back in his elements and skilfully guides the film towards its mindboggling, hallucinatory finale.
Equally atypical, the cryptic Animalia Parodoxa (Niles Atallah) would demand some time and patience from the spectator to be absorbed in its peculiar microcosm and appreciate the routines of its speechless main character. Using a rundown building as its main setting, the film establishes in a minimalistic way a small-scale post-apocalyptic arid world in which visiting the ocean becomes the protagonist’s obsessive dream. In its arcane tone, Animalia Parodoxa is evocative of the works of the Quay brothers and Jan Švankmajer; especially in the manner of the latter, the film brings together live action and stop motion. The film’s use of stop motion is saved for its last section; at that point, one can see why in the live-action sections the acting has a mechanical quality to it. Coming rather late, these animated parts make the spectator yearn for more. They validate the feeling that in combining the two materials seamlessly, the big challenge is to impregnate the live action with the same level of magic inherent to stop motion.
The restored versions of rediscovered genre films of the past have always been on the festival’s menu. Notable amongst the lot this year was Tiki-Tiki (Gerald Potterton) which turned up after many years of its unavailability in a decent quality. The film exemplifies the tradition of recycling and tinkering with non-American films in the US- a tradition that bears similarities with one of the surrealists’ prescriptions for cinema- and turning it into something more palatable for American audiences. In Tiki-Tiki this transformation entails rather extensive use of some new original creative work and a hybrid form in which newer animated sequences bracket and link fragments of a Soviet fantasy film. Only on a few occasions, there is a direct interaction between the two materials. For the most part, the ‘recycled’ parts of the Soviet films are simply “shown” as a film that is being shot and described by the star of the animated sections, an ape-shaped director. Animated sequences essentially work as a meta-narrative though all their elements – including their self-reflexivity- are inspired by the visual contents of the Soviet movie. One might get a feeling that this meta-function is adopted in order to explain the weirdness of the borrowed footage. Combined with obviously unfaithful dubbing of the Soviet film, the animated sequences engage in what is basically an act of cultural translation while picturing the purported creator of the live-action footage as a hippie-style, free-spirit character underscores the outsider status of popular non-American films and their deviations from the established norms of mainstream Hollywood.
Amongst the more conventional offerings of the festival, the feminine action (Ricky Ko) presents an update on the ‘girls with guns’ genre of Hong Kong cinema, which had its heydays in the 80s and the 90s. A teenage girl starts training karate in a club headed by a female police officer and inspired by her master tries to use her physical skills in righting the wrongs; as she eventually ends up messing with mobs, the course of the event reveals to her the true identity of her peace-loving mother. The film is marked by a strong sense of sisterhood, which even operates across the boundaries of good and evil. Under its action veneer, Out of Shadow is in essence a family drama, in which parents have to prove themselves to their children after their past has been exposed. Remarkably and in contrast with the trio of strong women that run the show in the film, the men on the good side – a reformed mobster who’s turned into a priest and his heartthrob son- are pictured as softies and weaklings, who take little active part in the action and mostly work to inject comedy and romance into the narrative. Of course, such presentation has its precedent in older Wuxia films.
A Samurai in Time (Junichi Yasuda) adapts a comic angle to pay tribute to the declining tradition of Jidai-Geki – costume dramas- in Japanese cinema. The film transports its hero crossing his sword with his enemy into contemporary Japan and lands him amidst a film studio specialised in making historical films. The first part of the film contains the typical antics of time travel, which still do not fail to entertain, and culminates in the protagonist’s decision to take part in shooting films as an extra. The surprise for him and the next turning point for the film comes when he realises that he wasn’t the sole time-traveling samurai. Beyond a time travel asynchrony which paves the way for a grand samurai duel, the film doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table, and the romantic thread between the samurai and the diligent and ambitious assistant director and especially the latter’s potential for further development is eclipsed by the film’s nostalgic preoccupations.
The time travel device is treated with more formal playfulness in Rodrigue Huart’s short film Réel which also puts a rather fresh spin on the commonplace critique of social media culture and imitation of their video style. Here a mobile phone – which can be regarded as the main subject and the video recorded by it as its point of view- is sent back in time, only to be found by two rural girls. Perceived as a magical object and almost in the manner of the proverbial vanity mirror in the Snow White fairy tale, the device elicits their narcissistic and selfish response and reminds us of the timelessness of fascination with the self-image.
Two other standout shorts at this year’s Fantasia both explore the formal possibilities offered by limited camera set-ups in the creative formation of the cinematic space. The bulk of Extras (Marc-Antoine Lemire) consists of a conversation, shot from only 3 angles, between a talent agent and her increasingly frustrated actress client who has been offered what amounts to an extra’s role. With extras present in the background of each shot, someone with an eye for editing is easily reminded of the significance of consistency of their performance, despite the actress’ vehement objection to being relegated to such a position. As the women’s argument heats up, changes and goings-on in the background begin to become visually more appealing and inviting for the eyes than the exchanges of the main actors. The background actors a.k.a. extras steal the show and despite the size and position of the lead actors in the frame and the dominance of their conversation on the soundtrack take our focus from the foreground, to the point that we even forget about following the lead actors’ lines. In this way, the film not only glorifies the background acting but also shows the triumph of the visual details and motion over the dialogue. Tomas Palombi in Au prix de la Chair employs a single long take in conjunction with a reflective surface in order to condense the entire narrative space in one shot. However, the chosen reflective surface is itself atypical. The film shows the whole affair as a reflection in the eye of an immobile person, unifying the point of view and the viewing organ. Using the blurry and imperfect reflection and abstaining from revealing the full face of the on-looker, the film’s visual strategy stands somewhere between showing and not showing, and in this way, it builds its mystery. Amplified in this magnified view, the quick movements of the eyeball and the eyelid intensify the suspense of the situation since by ghost-like reflections and the frenzied dialogue alone it’s impossible to tell what they are reacting to. In my view, the film can stand as one of the most creative uses of a single take, especially in the context of genre cinema.
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