Fantasia Fest 2020 – Catching Up and Wrapping Up : Sonic Cinema

Fantasia Fest 2020 – Catching Up and Wrapping Up

Posted by Brian Skutle Posted on Sep - 2 - 2020 0 Comment

My personal experience at the 2020 Fantasia Fest began with screening “Crazy Samurai Musashi” on July 31, and it ended on September 1 as I watched the wild documentary, “Class Action Park”– which screened at the fest last week before heading over to HBO Max. This was my third film festival in over a year that I’ve covered, and it was unlike any of the ones before it, due to the virtual nature it took on this year because of COVID-19. But then again, the 2019 Atlanta Film Festival and 2020 Women in Horror Film Festival were very different from one another, as well, and this year’s Atlanta Film Festival will be still different from last year’s version. As with DragonCon, even though the same thing is fundamentally taking place each year (except for this year, where it had to go virtual), the experience is different based on how one prioritizes their time, and that’s the exciting part for me. Fantasia Fest was no different, and the staff did a wonderful job of making it feel like a film festival, even though we were all at home in how we were taking it in, whether it was the Discord or the live events or the screenings themselves. While I do hope to cover it in person one year, this was an unforgettable Fantasia Fest experience, and for all the right reasons.

Saturday, August 29
I began Saturday at work, and ended it with Troma; honestly, I couldn’t tell you whether the beginning was better or the end, but that’s just how it is in the time of COVID-19. Surrounding Troma, however, was a varied and pretty terrific slate of films, which started with the French Western, “Savage State”, about a French family’s attempts to go back to their native country during the Civil War. While I didn’t love it narratively, writer-director David Perrault’s visual sense of the genre is a wonder to take in. At 5pm the “Born of Woman” short film block played, which included “Diabla”– a rape-revenge short I had seen at the Women in Horror Film Festival, and also discussed with the filmmakers prior to Fantasia Fest in an interview session embedded with my review- and started out strong with some comedic shorts like “Come Fuck My Robot” and “Blocks” before kind of petering out after “Diabla” with some longer, more dour films I had a hard time getting into. One movie I didn’t have difficulty getting into was Xia Magnus’s supernatural tale, “Sanzaru”, which focuses on a live-in nurse who senses some unnatural things occurring around her patient, who has dementia. My interview session with Magnus was one of the first ones I held for the festival, and we had a fascinating conversation about the film which you can hear on the review page. Meanwhile, playing at the same time as the Troma was a nifty little thriller about the nature of memory, and how extracting them can cause rifts in personality, in “Minor Premise”– it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible with this one, because it’s a fun premise executed well.

That brings us to Troma, and the great Lloyd Kaufman. His offering at the film festival was “#ShakespeareShitstorm”, and it was the only live screening available outside of Canada (and even then, it was only available to the US). Rather than just request a screener, I decided to go ahead and pay for the live screening, and I don’t regret the decision at all. I think. Maybe a little. This was my first, real Troma and Kaufman film, and it was everything I’ve heard about Troma being, for better or worse. It was shockingly vulgar, really stupid, and kind of fun to watch. It was preceded by a short film called “Crap Man”, and that was fun for what it was, and you know what? So was “#ShakespeareShitstorm”. The film, for some reason, uses Shakespeare references as part of a larger commentary on cancel culture and woke liberal outrage that, as a liberal, I actually found to be on-point in how it saw the ridiculousness of being “too PC,” something which I do think can be a thing, and I think it’s important that we can recognize those impulses and grow to be genuinely empathetic while still being respectful. If nothing else, I appreciated that much about Kaufman’s batshit insane film, and am glad I watched it for that reason. I did not stick around for the Q&A with Kaufman, though; I was ready for sleep, and that is on Fantasia Fest’s YouTube channel if I want to watch it, at some point.

Sunday, August 30
The last few days of the festival begin a combination of first screenings and second screenings, and it had some of my favorite films of the festival in the former category. But first, my final Special Event panel took place at 3pm and it was an insightful discussion between horror filmmakers Mick Garris (who directed the “Shining” miniseries) and Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleep,” “Ouija: Origins of Evil,” Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House”) where they discussed the complexities of adapting Stephen King, the differences between original work and adapted, and the process of building a TV series, as well as some hints about Flanagan’s follow-up season to “Hill House.” Flanagan is one of the most interesting horror filmmakers working today, and you can check out the discussion below, which I recommend you do, if you’re interested in horror or filmmaking. As for the films, the two films making their debut at the festival today I saw were Bao Tran’s “The Paper Tigers” and Chino Moya’s “Undergods”. One is a martial arts action comedy, the other is an ambitious and surreal fantasy anthology, but both have fascinating themes about humanity and the world at their center that make them well worth watching, and both resulted in interesting discussions with their respective filmmakers, which you can hear embedded with the reviews. I hope you decide to check those out.

Monday, August 31
On Monday morning, I caught up with a film I had really wanted to watch prior to the festival, and was delayed getting to me, in “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw”. This dark American Gothic thriller was one of the most unnerving films I watched during the festival, and it digs into your thoughts and memories with its haunting imagery- I’d prepare accordingly before watching it. There were more encore screenings today, as well as the debut of “Fugitive Dreams”, which is a thoughtful, unusually-structured drama about two individuals going through life, and the unexpected connection they form with one another- it’s worth checking out, if you find the chance to. Also screening on Monday was the “Short Gauge Trauma” short film block, and this was a powerful and bold one to experience going through the shorts. Each one deals with personal traumas in one way or another, whether it’s an abusive parental figure (“The Green Sea”), trying to impress foster parents (the deeply disturbing “Milk Teeth”) or getting in over your head with wishes (“Mr. ThisForThat”). There were some chilling, and darkly funny, stories here, and it was a good way to wrap up the live screenings for the short film blocks.

Tuesday, September 1
I will admit that, of the movies screening for the first time this day, I saw none of them. There were more than worthwhile second screenings of “Bleed With Me”, “Sanzaru” and “The Paper Tigers” for people who might have missed them earlier, but today was about wrapping up my personal viewing for the festival with “Class Action Park”, and getting my final longer interviews ready for publishing, whether it was with “Fried Barry” director Ryan Kruger or “PVT Chat”‘s Ben Hozie, both of which you can listen to at my review page for each. That actually makes this the perfect day under which to discuss the final short film block of the festival, the On Demand “Circo Animato” animated block. This was probably my collectively favorite one of the four short film blocks, and that’s because of the wide variety of animation styles and stories on display. Whether it was a cute children’s story in “The Spinning Top” or a funny social commentary like “Thin Blue Variety Show” or a devastating look at man and nature in a flooded Indian city in “Wade”, the filmmakers in this block just seemed to have the most to say, and the most creative ways of saying it of any of the short filmmakers on display in these blocks. That was especially true of my three favorites from this block- the historical religious narrative, “The Grave of Saint Oran”; the tense, anxious OCD story, “Inside Blue”; and “Reflexion”, which is about a conversation that takes on deeper meaning at the end, and meaning that should mean something to all of us after the past few months of COVID.

Wednesday, September 2
Everything from the past couple of weeks has led to this, the closing night of the festival. I will be at work as the last films play at Fantasia Fest, and unfortunately, the closing film, the action comedy, “The Legend of Baron To’a”, was not made available to critics, so- as with “The Reckoning”– that will have to wait for another day. The penultimate film, however, was made available to critics, and honestly, Gabriel Carrer and Reese Evenshen’s “For the Sake of Vicious” is a great way to end my coverage of the 2020 Fantasia Fest anyway. Over the 73 features and shorts I watched for Fantasia Fest over the past month, one thing has become very clear about the 2020 movie year as a whole, and that is the lack of variety in genres that have been available to us over the past four months since movie theatres have closed. Yes, horror and comedy have found a home in drive-in screenings and streaming and VOD releases, and dramas will always find a way of getting to audiences, but action, thrillers and sci-fi films have been in dire short supply since mid-March, and “For the Sake of Vicious”, which starts as a hostage thriller and turns into a brutal home invasion movie, was the film that made me really see that clearly. The 81-minutes of this film pack a punch both in how skillfully Carrer and Evenshen deliver thrills, while also having some more difficult ideas at its center. This is one of the must-see films of the festival, and it was great to be able to be a part of a roundtable Q&A with the filmmakers last week. You’ll be able to hear part of that on my podcast about Fantasia Fest, in which I will discuss what stood out for me, and what I’m taking away from this experience, as well as my last two audio interviews I have not yet shared. I hope you enjoy! I certainly have.