Black Gate

In 2016, the Fantasia International Film Festival created a showcase of short films by women directors: Born of Woman. It was a very real success, a collection of intriguing and often powerful films, and it travelled as a collection to several other festivals. 2017 saw a new iteration of the showcase, boasting nine shorts from seven countries. Born of Woman 2017 played Saturday, July 22, and I was eager to see what was in store this year. Afterward I planned to go on to see a feature film, a Korean thriller called A Day (Haru) built around the Groundhog Day–like device of a man repeatedly living the same day. First, though, would be Born of Woman.

The program began with “A Little After Midnight,” (“Un peu après minuit,” also translated “Just After Midnight”) a 22-minute piece co-written and co-directed by France’s Anne Marie Puga and Jean-Raymond Garcia. It deals with a blind teacher (India Hair), witchcraft, and the interpretation of the world. If Hair’s teacher begins the film reliant on men’s sexualised tellings — a scholar who gives a fevered reading of one of Niklaus Mannuel Deutsch’s paintings of witches; later another man (Rémi Taffanel) who, at her request, tells her a pornographic story — then by the end of the story that’s changed as she finds a new source of power. There’s a subtext here, I think, deriving from Freud and his essay “The Uncanny,” in which he suggests the loss of the eyes is a symbolic castration. So in this movie there’s much to do with what is seen and what is hidden and the power that comes from seeing things — from identifying things and defining them. Visual art has resonance here, as do costumes that both hide and reveal. The film’s shot very nicely, with a dark, brooding feel that works well with the plot. The story’s not over-hurried, but the atmosphere’s the point, I think. If you can get into the feel of the thing, it’ll work; if not, perhaps not.

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On Saturday, June 22, I reached Fantasia’s Hall Theatre before noon to see a screening of the anime Napping Princess (Hirune Hime: Shiranai Watashi no Monogatari), a story about dreams, technology, and the 2020 Olympics. After that, I had a short film showcase to see, then another feature. But before either of those, I planned to pass by the Fantasia Samsung VR 360D Experience, which, as the name implies, gives people the chance to experience VR by watching one of a selection of short films. I’d tried out the technology last year with a number of short fiction films; this time out there was something a little different, a half-hour documentary called Welcome to Wacken, about the legendary annual German metal festival. I wanted to see how the technology would handle the documentary form, especially since I had all the respect in the world for the filmmakers — it was directed by Sam Dunn, whose previous work included the seminal metal documentaries Headbanger’s Journey and Global Metal.

First, though, was Napping Princess (which, according to Wikipedia, is also known as Ancien and the Magic Tablet). Written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama, it begins in a dieselpunk otherworld called Heartland, where a daring princess named Ancien (voice of Mitsuki Takahara) seeks to regain her magic tablet with the help of an animated toy bear called Joy (Rie Kugimiya). A monster called the Colossus threatens Heartland, and Ancien’s father, whose palace is an enormous car factory like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, has ordered her confined to a tower. But she escapes, meets a rebellious motorcycle-riding mechanic named Peach (Yôsuke Eguchi), and joins with him to counter the mysterious plot of the king’s sinister adviser (Arata Furuta) and the giant Colossus that emerges from the sea.

Until Ancien wakes up. In the world we view as real, a Japanese schoolgirl named Kokone is dreaming Ancien’s adventures. It’s 2020, and the Olympics are about to take place in Tokyo; Kokone and her father, Momotaro, a mechanic in the southern town of Okayama, wonder whether the autonomous cars Japan’s promised as a major part of the opening ceremonies will be ready on time (note that Okayama’s the setting for the original legend of Momotaro). But then Momotaro’s arrested and accused of corporate espionage against Shijima Motors, the company building the autonomous vehicles. Kokone has to escape Shijima’s representative, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the evil adviser of the king of Heartland, and work out the secrets contained in her father’s old tablet computer. What secret in his background has emerged? And how does it connect to the story of Heartland?

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Tuesday, July 18, I set off for Fantasia with another full day before me. I planned to watch three films for which I had three different expectations. First was Animals (Tiere), a German film promising surrealism and artfulness. Then the Chinese big-budget special-effects blockbuster Wu Kong. Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, House of the Disappeared (Si-gan-wi-ui-jip), a Korean horror movie based on a Venezuelan movie called The House at the End of Time (La casa del fin de los tiempos) which I’d seen three years ago during my first year covering Fantasia; I couldn’t help but wonder how that film would translate across cultures.

First was Animals. Directed by Greg Zglinski from a script by Jörg Kalt that was rewritten by Zglinski, it begins by introducing us to Nick (Philipp Hochmair) and Anna (Birgit Minichmayr), a couple whose marriage is under severe strain. Nick’s a chef who may be conducting an affair with an upstairs neighbour. Anna’s a writer trying to start a new novel but facing a creative block. They plan to go off to an isolated cottage in Switzerland, where Nick will try the local cuisine and Anna will focus on her book; in the meanwhile their apartment will be watched by Mischa (Mona Petri, who plays several roles). Strange things happen during the getaway, particularly following an accident on the road when Nick hits a sheep. The movie cuts between the couple and Mischa, as impossible events unfold, challenging time, space, cause, and effect.

The movie’s well-crafted. It has a polished look, with textured lighting and what ought to be a strong sense of atmosphere. And yet I wasn’t convinced. We get a host of strange things happening, from mysterious locked rooms to talking animals to a woman throwing herself out a window and vanishing. And yet none of them cohere. When we get some sense toward the end of the movie why we’re seeing all these strange things, the explanation feels slack. Not only is there no rational logic to what we watch, there’s no emotional logic either.

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Sunday, July 16, felt in some ways like the day Fantasia 2017 really began for me. I had three movies I planned to watch, of three very different kinds, though all at the De Sève Theatre. The first was a horror-inflected American independent film called The Honor Farm. The second was a Hong Kong action movie called Shock Wave (Chaak Daan Juen Ga). The third was a Chinese art movie called Free and Easy (Qīng sōng yú kuài). That mix of approaches, genres, and countries was characteristic of the festival. I looked forward to each movie individually, and to how they’d work together.

The Honor Farm was directed by Karen Skloss from a script written by Skloss with Jay Tonne Jr. and Jasmine Skloss Harrison — Skloss’ teen daughter. It’s the story of Lucy (Olivia Grace Applegate), who’s about to attend her senior prom and plans to lose her virginity with her boyfriend Jake (Will Brittain). It is, Lucy reflects, “the night I was finally free to do whatever I wanted. And everyone was expecting me to.” But things don’t go as she’d hoped. The date goes sour, and Lucy ends up hanging around with her best friend Annie (Katie Folger). They run into another group of teens led by the gothy Laila (Dora Madison Burge), who’re planning to go into a deep forest and take mushrooms provided by a group of boys led by the presumably-symbolically-named JD (Louis Hunter). There’s an abandoned prison close by they plan to investigate, the Honor Farm of the title. What will they find in the supposedly haunted building?

Nighttime, woods, hallucinating teens, an abandoned building, ghost stories: this sounds like a certain kind of horror movie, but in fact isn’t that at all. The Honor Farm owes very little to Wes Craven, and much more to John Hughes and David Lynch. That’s an odd pair of influences, and yet I found them inescapable: structurally the story’s about a weird mixture of teens with nothing in common who learn to be friends, while the story itself is built out of surrealism, dream-imagery, disorienting sounds and cuts, and extended sequences that might have happened and might only be hallucinations. Surprisingly, the two things balance each other very well. The arc of the story gives a clear framework for the stylish eruptions of the unreal.

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I had an odd schedule on Sunday, July 17. There were two movies I wanted to see. The first was a Chinese historical martial-arts film called The Final Master (Shi Fu), which played at noon. The second was a live-action Japanese manga adaptation, Tokyo Ghoul (Tôkyô gûru), and that played at 9:35 in the evening. I eventually decided to go to the Hall Theatre for the first movie, spend the afternoon doing errands, and return for the second movie in the evening. In the end, this turned out to be a good plan.

The Final Master was written and directed by Haofeng Xu, based on his original novel. It follows Chen Shi (Fan Liao), a martial-arts master, who arrives in the city of Tianjin in 1932. He wants to establish a school there of his own but faces opposition from the major schools already in the city. He has to overcome a series of challenges from his scheming rivals, political as well as physical. He begins a romance with Zhao Guohui (Jia Song, also at Fantasia this year in the Hong Kong action film Shock Wave), a beautiful woman with a scandal behind her, and begins training a rickshaw driver named Geng (Yang Song, who was also in both of Xu’s previous movies, Judge Archer and The Sword Identity) who may have even more talent for fighting than Chen himself. But if Geng may help him overcome some of the trials set by the other schools, yet other levels of politics come into play as the military plans a takeover of the martial-arts world.

This really only scratches the surface of the intricate film. There’s a novelistic feel to it in the accumulation of incident and character, but it’s remarkably effective because Xu keeps things moving at a rapid if not unforgiving pace. Plans are hatched, betrayals accumulate, and the scope of the film increases bit by bit. It’s not quite an epic, but characters who seem minor develop into major figures, and the city of Tianjin acquires a character of its own.

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