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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