Now in its 28th year, Fantasia International Film Festival is North America’s whoppingest genre festival, a continental pace-setter whose three-week sprawl and seemingly boundless cinematic variety are hard to come by anywhere else. No other festival can match its freak. Or, for that matter, its fan-driven, geek-approved, cinephile-stoking ethos, something that is so often overshadowed by the corporate presence that invades many of the more elite movie showcases around the world.
The fest, which runs over 18 days and nights each summer in Montreal, brings together some of the planet’s rowdiest audiences with a parade of global auteurs, underground troublemakers, and indie breakouts – almost all of whom wind up at a downtown Irish bar after hours. It’s hard to beat.
Here’s a glance at some of the more notable films that played at the Fantasia the past two weeks.
It’s impossible to imagine a better kick-off to Fantasia than something as certifiably unhinged as Chainsaws Were Singing. Sure, you may say to yourself, a decade-in-the-making, super-low-budget, Estonian-language musical about a tragic chainsaw-wielding serial killer and the star-crossed young lovers he repeatedly tries to butcher is probably exactly what the world needs right now, but who could possibly make it?
Steppenwolf
That would be Sander Maran, who honed a Swiss Army knife assortment of skills in the process of writing, directing, editing, scoring, sound designing, and creating the visual effects (and who knows what else?) for his two-hour gross-out comedy. The DIY delirium nods to its obvious source – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – with its own culturally specific version of a backwoods cannibal clan. Still, it ultimately owes more to the anarchic, absurdist spirit of Monty Python and Peter Jackson. Asked why he wanted to write a musical, Maran answered in the same spirit: “Because I hate musicals.”
Adilkhan Yerzhanov is only 42 and already has 18 films to his credit, making him something like a one-man juggernaut of the Kazakhstan film industry. The vast, Central Asian republic – a former Soviet state – may have been the butt of a million Borat jokes, but no one who witnesses Yerzhanov’s latest, the brutal Steppenwolf, will leave laughing.
The film offers a scorched, post-apocalyptic hellscape where human life is nearly valueless. Cruelty and suffering are the common coin in a nameless country whose ongoing civil war is given no explanation or background. Desolation is all, and yet the ruined landscape abides somehow with the widescreen grandeur of a John Ford Western. The captivating cinematography guides the audience into a world it might otherwise wish to avoid, where the story’s proposed hero is a torture expert introduced cheerfully, slicing off the fingers of a detainee reluctant to talk.
As screams fill the air, the camera closes in on Brajyuk (Berik Aitzhanov), who dons a pair of sunglasses with heart-shaped frames as he proceeds with his dirty work. This hatchet man soon finds himself on a more epic mission when he meets a desperate, nearly-mute woman named Tamara (Anna Starchenko) whose 5-year-old son has been snatched away by organ traffickers – an operation run by the same local overlord who murdered Brajuk’s family. The pair embark on a hyper-violent trek through a wasteland, a journey that seemingly positions its lethal leading man as a character worthy of redemption even as it consistently reminds you that he’s a nihilist scumbag.
