Black Gate

Among the pleasures of the Fantasia Film Festival are the showcases of short films. Some of these feature-length collections get a new iteration every year, while some come and go depending on what’s submitted to the festival. Fantasia’s programmers have a great sense of how to group shorts together, meaning not only are the annual showcases reliably strong work, but new themes are bound to present work of major interest as well. So one of the things that intrigued me the most when I first saw Fantasia’s 2021 schedule was Radical Spirits, a collection of six short films about (broadly speaking) traditional ways of being and traditional spiritual paths. I decided to make it my second viewing of the festival.

The first piece came from Korea: Chu Hyun-a wrote, directed, edited, and animated “A Sip of Water,” a fine 7-minute animated film about the role of shamans in the modern world (like many of these shorts, it’s not on IMDB.com at this writing, so I can’t find the original Korean title). The 2D animation flows from one image into another, with lovely colours and linework. A Korean shaman discussing her perspective on her profession is fascinating — “I am unusual,” she says, “because gods are in me, and I deliver the gods’ message” — but the visual experience is a fitting complement. Recurring water imagery gives the short a rhythm, while it also develops the idea of shamanism in the modern world. Overall it’s a powerful representation of the spiritual experience of shamanism.

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Last year I almost reviewed a movie at Fantasia called 1BR. But exhaustion got to me as the festival wore on, and I passed on the film. I’m never happy about having to compromise with fatigue, though, and since 1BR recently came to Netflix — where for a while it was among their 10 most-streamed movies, at one point even reaching the top 5 — I decided to rectify last year’s omission and take a look at it now.

Written and directed by David Marmor, his first feature film, it follows Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a young woman who feels estranged from her father (Alan Blumenfeld). Working in Los Angeles as a temp with aspirations to become a costume designer, she finds her first apartment as the film opens. Though the plumbing makes strange noises, her neighbours seem nice and Sarah befriends an old former actress named Edie (Susan Davis) while being drawn to the handsome Brian (Giles Matthey). But creepy one-eyed Lester (Clayton Hoff) keeps trying to push a weird old book about community. And Sarah’s got a secret: she moved in with her cat, Giles, even though building manager Jerry (Taylor Nichols) told her there were no pets allowed.

In fact things are worse than Sarah imagines. It turns out the book about community’s a bible for the apartment block — and that all the residents are part of a cult-like group prepared to force Sarah to join them. Acts of physical and psychological torture follow. Sarah is broken down and slowly builds herself back up, and it all builds remorselessly to a powerfully symbolic final shot.

The movie works because it pays so much attention to Sarah’s character, as well as the people around her. Bloom brings out Sarah’s flaws as well as her strengths. She is thoughtless enough to sneak the cat into a pet-free building without thinking about other people’s allergies. And she is weak-willed, unformed in certain ways as the film starts. The story has a strong subtext investigating her feelings about her father and unconscious search for replacement father figures; it’s a horror-thriller as bildungsroman, building to an overtly Freudian choice with an icepick.

The movie’s tone and visuals bring this out quite nicely. The film’s drenched with warm sunlight in its exterior shots, presenting a kind of warmth that echoes the self-image of the residents of the apartment block. Interiors of Sarah’s apartment emphasise bare white walls and wooden floors, the unyielding emptiness of unfurnished rooms. There’s a lovely moment early on as Sarah tries to sleep in her new apartment, which I think captures the dislocation of the experience of the first night in a new home. Conversely, later in the film all the homier scenes become unreal, as the rules and philosophy of the community become more detailed. The imagery of the building interiors ironically underscore the extreme rejection of the outer world and the unreality of the residents’ world-view, the willed aversion to external fact they push on Sarah.

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Every year I wrap up my coverage of Fantasia with a last post looking back at the festival, reflecting on the experience. This year’s edition of Fantasia calls for reflection even more than most. I have a couple of posts still to come taking care of loose ends from previous years, but here are a few final thoughts on the all-streaming 2020 Fantasia Film Festival.

First, as always, thanks go out to the team of people who made the festival possible. This time out I want to especially thank the social media team who kept a Discord channel going through the festival, answering questions and maintaining a group space for talking about movies, particularly Social Media Strategist Alyssia Duval-Nguon. The festival was always going to suffer from the inability to hang out with friends in person, but Fantasia’s people did the best they could under the circumstances.

Which I think sums things up for this year. I have no idea what things were like behind the scenes, but from my perspective as viewer and critic the Festival was the best I could imagine it being given the state of the pandemic. Technologically, my experience was as smooth as I could reasonably hope. It’s unfortunate that the festival lasted only two-thirds as long as usual, but the films had the level of quality I’ve come to expect. It seemed to me there fewer big-budget movies, but the range of smaller films meant I didn’t miss them much.

Still, it is clearly obvious that a theatre environment would have been a better way to watch these movies. Some of them, like Hunted, seemed to aim at using sensory power to overwhelm the viewer in a specific way; but all of them would have gained by the theatrical experience. It’s not just a question of the size of the image and the loudness of the sound system, but of the details that come out when you see the picture blown up and when you hear the sensitivity of the speakers. And in my experience films are only helped by watching them along with a Fantasia audience.

I also have to say that while the technological side of the event was run flawlessly by Fantasia, I personally had a couple of issues due to the equipment I was using. My laptop’s not the newest, and had a tendency to stop once or twice per film to buffer for a few seconds. Generally the streaming experience shifts some of the burden of keeping things running onto the audience. Usually to be sure of watching a movie I want to watch, I just have to make sure I’m in the right line at the right time. Watching a stream means I have to be sure that my computer’s not feeling temperamental, which is hard to guarantee; for example, I almost missed Jesters: The Game Changers because my firewall acted up. So there was a bit of unusual stress involved in watching the scheduled movies.

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My final film of Fantasia 2020 promised to be weird, and therefore the perfect way to wind down the festival. It was a take on a particular sub-genre of science fiction film: the alien visitor walking among us. The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Starman, E.T., technically I suppose Superman — all stories about a lone extraterrestrial on Earth dealing with humans. It’s a story form that lends itself to reflection on what it means to be human. But just because a form points in a certain direction doesn’t mean every instance of that form will be concerned with grand themes.

Consider Fried Barry, the debut feature from Ryan Kruger. It follows Barry (Gary Green), an abusive drug dealer in Cape Town who’s abducted by aliens and has an inhuman intelligence planted into his body. Returned to Earth, the alien in Barry’s form wanders about learning of human ways. These ways include, in no particular order, drug use, prostitution, sex, violence, fatherhood, and stranger things.

And that’s more or less the movie. There isn’t much plot beyond loose connections from one escapade to the next. Barry, or the alien inhabiting Barry, doesn’t develop much — the alien’s not established as a character to start with, so it’s impossible to see how the creature changes through the course of the story. Supporting human characters, notably Barry’s wife Suz (Chanelle de Jager) get to develop a little but not really enough to give the tale any kind of centre.

For better or worse, this is a picaresque journey through the bad side of town and of humanity. It’s entertaining, as far as that goes, and unpredictable. There’s a convincing grittiness to the city Barry-the-alien explores, not so much a realism as a reality consistently distorted yet recognisable. The underbelly of Cape Town is believable, at least for the sake of the film, in part because it’s inhabited by cartoons. This is a story about a hapless and mute protagonist falling into one damn thing after another, and not obviously learning from it; so the quality of the scrapes the alien gets into is key to the story, and in that respect the movie doesn’t disappoint. It may or may not be enough for any given viewer, but it’s a film that has its own specific wavelength and will reward viewers tuned into that frequency.

I suspect there are good reasons why the film’s built the way it is. To start with, while Gary Green’s expressive and rubber-faced and a distinctive visual presence, he’s not a formally trained actor. He’s a long-time extra in South African films (so I have learned from an excellent question-and-answer panel with Kruger and producer James C. Williamson), and in 2017 was cast in a short film Kruger was making about a heroin addict freaking out after a hit. That 3-minute piece was titled “Fried Barry,” and drew such a strong reaction Kruger decided to expand it into a feature, designing a story around Green’s presence.

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In covering a film festival, one does not always select the films one sees out of a pure love of cinema. Or even love of genre. Scheduling plays a part, and sometimes delivers to you an unexpected delight. Fantasia 2020 had fewer happy accidents of scheduling due to its all-virtual nature, but as the festival’s final day wound down I found myself with just under three hours until all the movies would go offline — meaning I had time for the film I’d wanted to watch, plus an hour or very slightly more. Glancing over the schedule I found a movie I’d considered looking at which was listed at 61 minutes, and decided I should give it a shot.

Jeremy Rubier’s Sayo was scheduled with two shorts that I would not have time to watch, but it was intriguing enough on its own. A Japanese woman named Nagisa (Nagisa Chauveau) is mourning her twin sister, Sayo, whose last letter she’d never answered. After a ceremony at a Shinto temple in Tokyo, a strange taxi driven by a demigod (Jai West) takes her on a trip to the breathtaking landscape that is the land of the dead. There, she will face her grief even more intensely and perhaps come to some kind of peace.

Rubier, a Quebecois director living in Japan, wrote and directed the film after Chauveau recounted to him the true story of her twin Sayo. He worked out the story while reading Sayo’s letters, watching home movies of her (some of which appear in his film), and listening to her music (again, some of which is heard in the feature). In January of this year, according to Rubier in a fascinating question-and-answer session, he heard about the COVID-19 pandemic emerging and, having lived in China, at once guessed at what was coming and insisted on shooting the film right away; he finished the script in January and shot it (over six days) a couple months later.

It’s stunning to think that this film was entirely shot and finished in less than nine months. It’s beautiful, measured, and thought-through. The narrative is rudimentary, but the emotional content is powerful, and emerges through the visuals in a purely cinematic way.

It is true that this is mostly a mood piece, but it’s a mood piece that works. Given the short running time, the narrative framework’s as detailed as it needs to be. Nagisa moves through different places and different phases of grief, and what she’s feeling at any given moment is perfectly clear and comprehensible. She encounters temples and religious ceremonies as well as surreal moments, and has flashbacks of memories of her sister, and you have the feeling of her moving along a journey of coping with grief.

Chauveau does a remarkable job here, acting for the most part not against other actors but on her own against the landscape, sharing the screen with the beauty of woods or shoreline. Still, she brings out what her character feels at every moment. It is true that the nature photography is excellent, whether seen from her perspective or overhead through stately drone footage. But her acting means we see more than the elegance of pretty pictures; Chauveau gets across her character’s emotion in isolation so well, the landscape becomes a reflection of her and is animated by her grief.

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Critic Farah Mendlesohn introduced the term ‘portal fantasy’ in her 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy to describe stories in which a protagonist leaves their home and enters a new, larger, magical world. I’ve seen the term used often to refer to a specific subtype of these fantasies, in which a protagonist from conventional reality passes through a portal to a fictional realm and proceeds to quest about and have adventures. The rise of this more specific definition is not entirely surprising, given how common that kind of story is, perhaps especially with younger protagonists. Either sort of portal fantasy can present a character, confronted with a new and strange world, with an opportunity to grow and change. Or, instead, can be about reification of the character’s previous identity — a locking-in of who they are, after the success of a quest that aims to stop a bad change form occurring.

Such is A Costume For Nicolas, an animated film from Mexico. It’s directed by Eduardo Rivero and written by Miguel Uriegas, based on the book Pablo y El Baúl by Jaime Mijares (there’s an English version and a Spanish version, Un Disfraz para Nicolas; Fantasia presented the English version). The studio that made it, Fotosintesis Media, has a mission to create positive “social impact,” and so this film is a fantasy following Nicolas, a young boy with Down syndrome, voiced by a young actor with Down syndrome, Fran Fernández.

The condition’s not named onscreen, but informs the character: 10-year-old Nicolas is who he is, a happy child raised by his mother (voice of pop star Paty Cantú), who makes him costumes and tells him stories about a fantasyland where a powerful but mysterious wizard dispelled nightmares at a high cost. When Nicolas must go to live with his grandparents and his cousin David, he not only has to fit in at a new home and a new school, he also must stop the monster feeding on David’s nightmares — which leads both boys into the fantasy world of Nicolas’ mother’s stories. There, his costumes become a magic which gives them a hope of completing a quest to save the world and free David from nightmare.

It’s a lovely film that fundamentally works. It’s colourful and imaginative, the 2D animation always bright and energetic. The designs are excellent, particularly in the fantasyworld with its castles and magic. The human characters are good pieces of design, too, with expressive faces and figures a little like the adult humans of Calvin & Hobbes.

The story’s a little oddly structured, in that it’s a bit slow to get to the fantasyworld, and once it does it takes place almost entirely in that other realm. In other words, it doesn’t try to balance the two realities. But this works surprisingly well — Rivero and Uriegas perhaps understand that once we get fully into a story’s fantasy world, returning to a mimetic world can be a hard sell. The delayed gratification of the fantasy here may be tough for young children, clearly the primary audience of the film, who must wait for the really wondrous parts. But then again, it also means the film builds to its most spectacular moments, giving us a chance to get used to its visual style and to live with the characters.

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The Fantasia Film Festival usually runs around three weeks, but 2020 and its myriad of challenges meant this year’s festival lasted only two-thirds of that. Time moves fast, faster still during Fantasia, and so it came about that with a sudden shock I found myself in the final hours. I had three on-demand movies still to watch that I hadn’t gotten to, and only one on a fixed schedule, my first of the last day.

That film was called Fugitive Dreams, and it was directed and scripted by Jason Neulander from a play by Caridad Svich. It opens in an abandoned gas station where a Black woman, Mary (April Matthis) is about to slit her wrists in the ladies’ room. At which point a White man named John (Robbie Tann) bursts in, grabs some toilet paper, and almost incidentally stops her suicide attempt. The two of them, neither entirely mentally healthy, become squabbling comrades as they set out across what appears to be an empty midwestern America, sometimes riding the rails like hobos in old movies.

The exact era of the story’s difficult to pin down; after drive-in movies have been around a while, but probably before cell phones and the internet. On their journey John and Mary meet other drifters, including the menacing Israfel (Scott Shepherd) and his mute mother Providence (O-Lan Jones). Interleaved with this story are dreams, visions, and memories — along with lies and questions, notably about John’s background and parentage. It all makes for a surreal road movie without a real destination.

Most of the movie is stunning high-contrast black-and-white, and it’s quite striking — like an older film in its lighting, but a modern one in its visual storytelling. Some dreamlike segments are in colour, and while they look fine, other than a recurring image of a poppy field none of them quite match the stark beauty of the wide-open monochrome spaces, or of a nighted conversation in a shuddering boxcar. The acoustic soundtrack’s a fine match for the imagery, emphasising the way the film aims at evoking classic Americana. Old movies are referred to in dialogue, a kind of imagined paradise for John, and the sense of a road-trip film is very strong.

So are the religious overtones, visible in the names of the characters, and in the choice of an abandoned church for the film’s climax. But to what end is less clear. The empty church echoes the empty landscapes of the film, and hints at the characters’ abandonment by God; if you see them as searching for the divine, it’s certainly a downbeat symbol. But it’s a little unclear what the characters actually are seeking. A home, perhaps, but that’s left underdeveloped.

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