Taking place annually in Montreal, the Fantasia International Film Festival celebrates 30 years of showcasing outstanding genre cinema, juxtaposing pop culture with alternative culture, and creating bridges between the cutting edge and the mainstream. Renowned worldwide for its distinct programming, Fantasia understands the broadness and continuous evolution of genre cinema and has become a destination for audiences hungry to discover new auteurs and films that cannot be easily categorized.
British Columbia filmmakers and locations shined their strange light at the festival this year, with five features and five shorts bursting with creativity, boldness, turbulence, and disquiet. Read on to discover the films and filmmakers that made their mark at Fantasia this year:
Feature Length
FREAKS PART II (dir. Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein)
Tailing their 2018 sleeper hit FREAKS and the critically acclaimed FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES, co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein return to their mutant roots with FREAKS PART II. With this sequel, Lipovsky and Stein have reimagined the superhero narrative, featuring vilified anti-heroes and real-world consequences.
The film reunites audiences with Mary and her daughter Chloe as they live on the road, hiding their powers and identities. They are hunted by the Abnormal Defence Force, the paramilitary police that specialize in ruthlessly exterminating “freaks” like them. Fueled by revenge, Mary is set on finding the ADF officer who killed her first child, while trying to control Chloe, now a precocious and powerful tween who is worlds away from the typical comic book hero. With dazzling violence and thrills, FREAKS PART II skillfully conveys themes of police states, family, and finding your tribe.
Still from A SAFE DISTANCE (2026)
A SAFE DISTANCE (dir. Gloria Mercer)
Fresh off its world Premiere at South by Southwest, Gloria Mercer’s A SAFE DISTANCE takes us into the wilderness of B.C., where one woman reinvents herself, escapes a mundane life to the dangerous world of an off-grid couple, and experiences a sexual reawakening.
Alex and Joey have been together for eight years, and they’re celebrating by going camping. One gets the sense that Alex isn’t exactly thrilled with the trip, but she goes along with him for their romantic getaway. When Joey proposes to her, he doesn’t get the answer he expects. The next morning, Alex finds herself alone to find her way out of the dense forest, and she falls, hitting her head. She’s found by Kianna and Matt, a couple roughing it in their van, and they invite her to join them at their camp. There is a nationwide alert for bank robbers, and Alex knows she’s probably in their company, but she’s excited by the danger Kianna and Matt pose. It’s a different world from her humdrum life with Joey, and she’s clearly attracted to them. When that old adage of two’s company comes true, and Alex creates waves between the criminal couple, the stakes escalate, and the tension rises.
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer Palm-winner is already poised to be a modern classic and was filmed on Vancouver Island, making use of the region’s beautifully disquieting forests and lakes. It follows queer director Kris, who is obsessed with rebooting an outdated and overdone slasher franchise, known as CAMP MIASMA. Her complicated and woke filmmaker life is consumed by these problematic movies and especially re-casting the final girl of the original film, Billy Presley. Kris visits the reclusive actress at her home in the abandoned camp where the film was shot. She lives on junk food and obsessively rewatches a 35mm print in her small home theatre, giving audiences a chance to watch the film-within-a-film and experience it in its glorious gore.
Attempting to modernize a film franchise riddled with ignorant and transphobic tropes, TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA explores how complicated identity and desire is when it is informed by problematic pop culture. Revelatory, seductive, and scary, the film descends into delirium, a pressure cooker where classic tropes and threats are symptoms of hierarchies, power imbalances, the act of seeing and being seen.
INSECTASY (dir. Angus Silver)
Sadie’s overwhelmed by the world, her work, her obligations, and her erotic fascination with insects. Part homage to the 1970s erotic thrillers, with a touch of creepy-crawly, INSECTACY presents an anxious, out of balance world marked by isolation and paranoia. With an offbeat, dark sense of humour and a violet-casted colour scheme, the film pierces the sterility of contemporary life with the disruptive transgression of eroticism. Featuring dreamy fantasy sequences that interrupt and disrupt Sadie’s life and an evocative sound design, the film draws us into the sensual and unusual interiority of its characters. Its throwback vibes pulse with rhythmic, insect-inspired sounds, and flatter the film’s ASMR, erotic-storytelling voiceover; a fantasy music for a fantasy voice. Blurring the line between waking and sleeping life, INSECTASY indulges in the viscerally gross to examine a deep-seated loneliness endemic to Sadie’s experience, but also deeply relatable.
CASTRATION MOVIE CHAPTER III JUNIOR GHOSTS—PREMORPHIC DRIFT; A FRAGMENTARY PASSAGE (dir. Louise Weard)
Louise Weard’s CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY has been an act of defiance, embracing the production models and aesthetics of underground filmmaking to create a contemporary epic and heaping dose of the darkest corners of Internet culture. Shot on an Hi8 camcorder and collaborative in nature, the films have become a kind of who’s-who of the Canadian indie scene and a new wave of Trans filmmakers at the cutting edge of transgressive cinema.
With this latest film, Louise Weard creates a festival-exclusive two-hour fragment from YEAR OF THE HYENA, the anthology’s third installment. Focused on one segment that will make up the final five-hour-plus film, the film stars Avalon Fast as she does everything in her power to stop her partner from transitioning. Haunting and anxious, the film explores the unrelenting violence transwomen are subjected to in an increasingly unforgiving and brutal world. Defiant in nature, the film has an unabashed honesty that feels transcendent rather than apologetic. It operates as a kind of blood pact: how far are you willing to go for what you believe in, and what are you willing to do to become your authentic self?
Short Films
THE LAST DYI SHOW (dir. Jo Gaffney)
Jo Gaffney’s 16mm punk rock nightmare finds photographer Dahlia in the midst of a tough breakup. Her day gets a whole lot worse as a zombie outbreak interrupts the show she is working at, forcing her to team up with her friends and ex-boyfriend to survive.
DREAM SYNTH™ (dir. Ryley O’Byrne)
The line between human and machine blurs in Ryley O’Byrne’s haunting and devastating examination of the human subconscious, ruined and sublimated by encroaching artificial intelligence. A horror story about what we’ve given up in service of comfort and escape, DREAM SYNTH examines the sterile horrors of modern life and the transgressive resistance required to combat its parasitic violence.
Still from LOST WAX (2026)
LOST WAX (dir. Omorose Osagie)
Shot in Nigeria, LOST WAX follows a local bronze caster after a young girl goes missing from her apartment building. Tracing the connection between the disappearance of Edo girls from Benin City and the stolen art of the Benin kingdom, the short film is a moving piece about loss and grieving those we don’t know.
BAGMAN (dir. Connor Gaston, Vaughn Gaston)
Nat oversees a wildlife cam and tracks bears, deer, and other animals in their natural habitat. When a black garbage bag appears in the brush, she alerts her supervisor, who can investigate it since he’s on-site. When she witnesses something disturbing and her supervisor disappears, she must decide whether to drive five hours to the scene or watch the horror unfold online. This creepy short by Connor and Vaughn Gaston shows us how screens create complacency, shape our decisions to act, and call our empathy into question.
ICE COLD BEER (dir. Devon Mussett, Joey Lopez)
After a long day at work, a Latino man known as THE MECHANIC comes home to kick-back, relax and crack open a cold one, but his routine is interrupted when a group of ICE Agents infiltrate his home. Using his skills, he defends himself from the modern day Gestapo and does whatever it takes to put each and every one of them down.
