Black Gate

As part of the unusual nature of this year’s Fantasia, the festival organisers set up many more non-film special events than usual. Each day boasts a presentation, panel discussion, or other streamed activity, all of them to be archived on the festival’s YouTube page (in fact the organisers have just announced they’ll host a conversation between Jay Baruchel and Finn Wolfhard on August 29). Friday, August 21, began with a presentation by critic and author Carolyn Mauricette of “Afrofuturism: Visions Of the Future From ‘The Other’ Side.” It was a fascinating hour-long talk about Black creators and their work. Rather than focus on themes or analyse individual accomplishments, Mauricette gave a brief introduction about mass media views of Blackness and then positioned Afrofuturism as an alternative reality, listing artists in various fields, and indeed mentioning alternatives to Afrofuturism such as filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s Afrobubblegum. You can find the entire presentation here.

After that, I planned to watch the Argentinian horror film The Undertaker’s Home. Bundled with the feature came a short, “Abracitos,” directed by Tony Morales and written by Morales with Fer Zaragoza. The 11-minute Spanish short is a deeply atmospheric tale of two girls (Beatriz and Carmen Salas) alone at night, fearing a monster beyond the walls of the younger girl’s make-believe castle. It’s extremely well shot, evoking nonspecific fears of childhood, effectively setting up a monster without giving us details. It’s a strong minimalist piece that works on the imagination, and builds nicely to a crescendo of terror.

The Undertaker’s Home (La Funeraria) was written and directed by Mauro Iván Ojeda. It begins, appropriately, with a house, through which the camera glides in the middle of the night. That’s an effective way of showing us a bit about the people who live there: Bernardo (Luis Machín), the aging undertaker; Estela (Celeste Gerez), his young wife; and Irina (Camila Vaccarini), Estela’s daughter by a previous marriage. We also start to get a sense of the uncanny tied to the place. And the next morning there’s a more concrete image of strange goings-on: outside the house, everything to one side of a red line drawn along the ground looks as though a storm had hit. On the house’s side of the line, everything’s normal.

We soon learn that the family is under a kind of siege by the spirits of the dead, which might include the spirit of Irina’s dead father — who Estela claims was physically abusive to her. Irina’s not happy about living under siege, and about the rules the family has to follow. Estela’s not happy either, but wants to stay with Bernardo. Who himself seems to be strangely attracted to one of the invisible spirits. Slowly, we come to understand the strange situation, and the stresses the family’s under. And then new complications emerge, and we are shown that not everything is as we thought, both in the world of the dead and the world of the living family.

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My first scheduled film at Fantasia 2020 was Special Actors (Supesharu Akutâzu, スペシャルアクターズ), written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda. I loved Ueda’s previous film, 2018’s One Cut of the Dead (Kamera wo tomeruna!, カメラを止めるな！), and this is his first solo feature since; he co-directed 2019’s Aesop’s Game (Isoppu no Omou Tsubo, イソップの思うツボ), and this year posted a special short film follow-up to One Cut on YouTube. Special Actors turned out to be very different from One Cut while still dealing with themes of storytelling and acting and family — and doing something as structurally surprising as One Cut in a completely different way.

Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa) is a failing actor with a medical condition that causes him to faint when nervous; a lucky encounter with his brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), who he hasn’t seen for years, leads him to join Hiroki’s acting company, Special Actors. Rather than perform onstage, the Special Actors play roles in real life: they can be hired as extra mourners at a funeral, or to sit in the audience at the premier of a comic movie and laugh wildly. They will also do more elaborate things, like stage a fight with a guy so he can look tough in front of a girl he wants to impress, or pretend to be the new lover of a woman trying to break up with her abusive boyfriend.

In other words, the Special Actors stage scenarios to help people live their lives. They’re a troupe of weirdos complete with acting coach and scriptwriter, and despite his self-doubts Kazuto fits right in. Then a young woman, Miyu (Yumi Ogawa), comes to the Actors with a tricky request: her sister has joined a cult, who are working on getting her to turn over the family inn. Can the Special Actors expose the cult’s lies and save the inn?

The answer to that question of course involves a series of wild schemes, and schemes inside schemes. Yet this movie avoids frantic zaniness in favour of a constant but relaxed pace. There’s some mugging, but nothing extreme. Jokes come quickly, and build to appropriately chaotic scenes; still, as a whole the film’s anything but manic. There’s a kind of humanity to it that counterbalances the contrivances of the plot and its various twists and contortions.

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Most of the movies I want to see at Fantasia 2020 play at a scheduled time, but quite a few are available on demand for the next two weeks. One of those struck me as a good place to start this year’s unusual Fantasia-from-home: Justin McConnell’s documentary Clapboard Jungle. It’s about the process of putting a film together, focussing not so much on the technical details of directing but the much longer struggle to find financing.

McConnell’s previous film Lifechanger is the central case study for Clapboard Jungle. That movie played at Fantasia in 2018 (I thought it was a success, despite a few quibbles about plotting and concept), so I knew going in there’d be at least a glimpse of the familiar Hall and De Sève Theatres. I got that, and the sight of a few familiar festival faces. More important, I also got an intriguing documentary that showed the modern film industry from an unusual angle.

The movie’s structured around a video diary McConnell started in 2014, when he set out to make a new film. The movie he ended up making was not the movie he then expected to make, and Clapboard Jungle does a good job following the twists and turns that led him to Lifechanger. The loose narrative works because it gives McConnell a strong frame into which he fits interview snippets with filmmakers, producers, film festival organisers, and other industry people.

These snippets are well-chosen, illustrating the points McConnell wants to make. And they’re edited tightly, giving the film a fast pace, presenting a lot of information and ideas very quickly. McConnell starts with autobiographical material to set up why and how he got into film, but from there keeps a good balance between his personal story and the interviews that make up the larger part of Clapboard Jungle. He’s able to use the structure of the diary and the interviews to maintain a sense of forward narrative momentum while showing the process of arranging financing for a movie, which the film makes clear is a long, tedious, repetitive slog. As well, beyond documenting the stalls and reversals and occasional leap forward of the development process, he also shows himself slowly learning the ropes — going to film festivals and markets, for example. We have the feeling of learning about the process at the same time he does, which gives the documentary a needed sense of progress.

The heart of the film is this long struggle to set up a project, showing by example how a film comes to be — or, more usually, does not come to be. It’s a reminder that every film I or you watch, at Fantasia or elsewhere, beat the odds just by coming into existence. McConnell shows us what those odds really are. It’s a bracing look at a side of the industry that rarely comes into focus for outsiders.

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