Black Gate

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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After seeing two showcases of short films on the afternoon of Saturday, July 15, in the evening I went to my first movie of the 2017 Fantasia festival to screen in the 400-seat D.B. Clarke Theatre. That was a film called Mohawk. Directed by Ted Geoghegan, his second film after 2015’s We Are Still Here, with a script by Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix, it tells a story from the War of 1812. In upstate New York a British agent, Joshua (Eamon Farren, Richard Horne on Twin Peaks: The Return), is in a polyamorous relationship with a Mohawk woman, Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn), and a Mohawk man, Calvin (Justin Rain). Calvin’s stirred up American soldiers in the area by an injudicious attack; when Joshua meets a unit of about a half-dozen Yanks in the woods, Calvin and Oak save him — but the confrontation turns into a running battle. The brutality mounts, revelations are made at inopportune times, and an image from a dream recurs.

This is less an action film than a suspense film, built around two small groups chasing each other through the woods. The focus is admirable, but the last act of the movie drifts from suspense into fantasy-horror — or, perhaps, into a dark super-hero story. To me, there isn’t enough groundwork earlier in the film setting up the movement into fantasy. Viewers more sympathetic to the genre shift will appreciate the movie more, although I think there are a few other issues with it as well.

Before discussing the storytelling, it is perhaps worth talking about the film’s portrayal of the Mohawks in the context of a violent historical adventure. Notably, it avoids a lot of action-film clichés and imagery. This is clearly a movie that wants to be on the Mohawks’ side; I suspect audiences will have varying opinions of how well it succeeds at that. I can say that at the question-and-answer period after the film, Horn and Rain were clearly proud of their work and the story of the film. I can also say that a non-Indigenous friend of mine who works with First Nations people left the screening early.

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Saturday, July 15, looked like an unusual day for me at Fantasia: I’d mostly be seeing short films. It’d begin a bit after noon, with a set of shorts called SpectrumFest: Films from the Autism Spectrum, a collection of pieces from young filmmakers on the autism spectrum. Then would come this year’s edition of the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, featuring eight science-fictional short films from around the world. Both showings looked fascinating, if in different ways. SpectrumFest was new to me, but I’d seen the SF showcases in previous years, and been impressed both by the individual films and by the way they worked together — if short films are loosely equivalent to prose short stories, the SF short film showcases make excellent anthologies.

First came SpectrumFest. Montreal’s Spectrum Productions is a non-profit organization who works with youth and young adults on the autism spectrum, giving them resources and equipment to express themselves creatively through film and animation. Among other programs, Spectrum runs summer camps and a weekly after-school program, as well as Saturday morning cartoon-making workshops. This year, Fantasia hosted an exhibition of some of the films created by the young filmmakers working with Spectrum in a showcase that was free to the public. Almost two dozen of the student filmmakers’ productions were screened, collectively a stunning and unpredictable burst of creativity.

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