Black Gate

Weekend days are busy days at the Fantasia film festival. Weekends are when most people are most often free to see movies, so the programmers obligingly schedule a lot of films for Saturdays and Sundays. Last Saturday I had three movies I wanted to see. On the Sunday, I had five. Which meant that Fantasia was well and truly underway.

The first film on the Saturday was an anime from Japan called Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana o Kazaro, which according to Wikipedia translates directly as “Let’s Decorate the Promised Flowers in the Morning of Farewells”). Written by veteran anime screenwriter Mari Okada, it’s also her first feature as a director. Opening this weekend in a limited release across North America, and next weekend in the UK, it’s an elaborate secondary-world fantasy story that mixes the epic and the domestic startlingly well. Not only is it an early contender for my favourite film of this year’s festival, it’s immediately become one of the best high fantasy films I’ve ever seen.

In an idyllic forest live the Iorph, an immortal people who weave long cloths called the hibiol, which are symbols of their lives and destinies: “the work of a loom is like the flow of time,” we’re told early on, and this is a movie that is deeply concerned with time. For while the Iorph’s society is timeless, their world’s shattered by the invasion of a human army from the kingdom of Mezarte. The Mezartians ride dragonlike creatures called Renatos, and easily destroy the Iorph. Only one youthful Iorph escapes, Maquia (voiced by Manaka Iwami). In doing so she stumbles across a human infant, whose parents have been killed by bandits. She decides to save the child.

There are a lot of ways for the story to go at this point. Most of the standard ways would involve Maquia trying to overthrow the Mezarte, or maybe the baby growing up to fight them. Absolutely nothing like that happens. Instead the film follows Maquia as she wanders deeper into Mezarte, away from the ruin of her homeland, and tries to learn how to raise the child she’s now acquired. The concern of the movie is with how she lives over time, over the years as she raises her son, who she names Ariel (also Erial, according to the IMDB, in either case voiced by veteran voice actor Miyu Irino, who among other films had a role in Miss Hokusai and was the male lead in Spirited Away). The politics of Mezarte are important, but only insofar as they shape Maquia’s everyday life. We have to understand them to understand what’s happening to Mezarte society, and have to understand Mezarte society to understand what options there are for Maquia and Ariel and the other people they come to live with.

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Fantasy’s described by fantasy: consider John Crowley’s Little, Big, a novel about a faerieland where the further in you go the bigger the land becomes. A powerful image, it echoes the way fascinations gain in depth and scope the more you explore them. How familiar experiences can become strange the more you dig deeper into them, birthing mystery, growing weird. Art and story perhaps most of all. So I am about to begin my coverage of the Fantasia International Film Festival for the fifth year here at Black Gate, and I feel I have less of an idea of what I will see than ever. It is a place, a time, a state of mind, where anything can be seen; it is one of those notorious worlds whose only boundaries are that of imagination. And so the more you explore the more you learn how much more there is to explore.

This will be the twenty-second edition of the festival, North America’s largest genre film festival, featuring over 130 feature films from around the world. Last year more than 100,000 spectators saw a film at Fantasia, which is impressive in a time of declining theatrical attendance on this continent. But what’s most impressive is the range of offerings at Fantasia. Action-adventure films, experimental and underground films, rediscovered classic films — these things are only the beginning. I argued after last year’s festival that this is a new golden age of science fiction and fantasy film; spend time going through this year’s festival listings and you can see why. Modern genre film is in a complex dialogue with itself across languages and film industries, across years and filmmaking traditions. It is fluid, unpredictable, and international.

I write these posts in a diary format because I think that the experience of attending the festival is worth recording. Over the course of three weeks you see the same people in the media line, you talk with them, you get to know them. And then you see them again the next year. More than that, these are people you talk about films with, agreeing, disagreeing, asking questions, sharing information. I have a number of friends I only see at Fantasia. It’s a community that grows over twenty-one days or so, a little like a science-fiction convention — there’s even a bar where a lot of the festival community hangs out — but instead of (mainly) discussing works of art, we experience the art and then talk about it informally as opposed to attending a panel.

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