Fantasia 2021, Part VIII: Broadcast Signal Intrusion
I ended my second day of Fantasia 2021 with another feature-and-short bundle. The short film was “The Machine,” a 12-minute piece about a man, newly hired for an office job, who’s given the task of figuring out the purpose of a mysterious machine in the basement. The film was shot on an obvious budget, and though the actors give it their best efforts, the material doesn’t really work. In particular, there’s a shot right at the end whose placement suggests it’s delivering a piece of information crucial to the story — but if it is, I couldn’t figure out what the information was supposed to be. There’s an interesting Kafkaesque idea somewhere in here, but unfortunately it isn’t brought out very well.
The feature was Broadcast Signal Intrusion. It’s written by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall, and directed by Jacob Gentry, who also directed 2015’s Synchronicity. Like that film, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is dark and moody, following a man whose reality becomes radically destabilised. In this case, it’s a computer guy named James (Harry Shum Jr) in Chicago in 1999. He’s archiving old TV broadcasts, and becomes obsessed with a couple of weird incidents when pirates briefly took over the airwaves for a couple of minutes: broadcast signal intrusions. Driven to figure out the meaning behind them, he goes further and further down a dark path.
I started the second day of Fantasia with another feature and short film bundled together. The 14-minute short was the Catalan-language “Solution For Sadness” (“Solució per a la tristesa”), a collaboration between the husband-and wife-team of co-directors Marc Martínez Jordán (also the writer) and Tuixén Benet (also the star). Benet plays a woman who lives alone and battles intense depression; one day a box arrives that promises a cure in the form of a gorilla mask. But is it really a solution, or is it a cruel trick? The short has a lot to say about masks and what people are prepared to see, and the narration makes the storytelling work — it moves quickly, and there’s a dry yet heartfelt tone that’s quite affecting. The conclusion’s surprisingly empathic, and I found an ending that might have felt simple instead stuck with me after the film ended.
Most of the films at Fantasia 2021 were new, but some were time-honoured works given a screening either because of a new restoration or because they played the festival in the past and were brought back to celebrate Fantasia’s 25th anniversary. Uzumaki (うずまき, literally “Spiral”), from the year 2000, is a case of both — it has a new 4K restoration, and it played Fantasia in 2000. The film’s an adaptation of the manga by Junji Ito, though since it was made while the manga was still ongoing it’s an adaptation that had to find its own answers for some of the questions the text hadn’t resolved at the time of production. Directed by Higuchinsky, AKA Akihiro Higuchi, with a screenplay by Takao Niita, the movie came two years after Ringu (the original version of The Ring) and the same year as the first straight-to-video Ju-On film. It’s one of the early examples of J-horror, then, but sub-genre aside it’s something interesting to consider in its own right.
The second feature film I planned to see at Fantasia 2021 came bundled with an eight-minute short by a familiar name. That short was “Let’s Fall In Love,” written and directed by Shengwei Zhou, whose odd stop-motion feature S He 
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 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival presented most of its hundred-plus feature films over the internet, some of them streaming at scheduled times, others available across the duration of the festival. (Which ended on the 25th; I ended up watching so many movies during the three weeks the festival ran I didn’t have time to write about them.) Looking at the schedule for August 5th, the first day, I didn’t see anything scheduled that I wanted to cover, and decided to watch some of the on-demand titles. Which raised the question of which film would be the best way to start my Fantasia 2021 experience. After some havering, I made my pick.
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.