I wrote a little while ago about watching three documentary films bundled together at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, centred around the short feature You Can’t Kill Meme. There was another set of three documentaries at Fantasia this year, and as the festival drew to a close, I sat down to watch them as well. These two shorts and the short feature Dear Hacker were a bit more diverse in subject matter, but shared themes of technology and power. First…
“Aquatic Bird” is an 18-minute short film from Chinese writer-director Zhang Nan. It weaves together the stories of three interrelated characters — a prostitute (Bird), a man who admires her from a distance (Aqua), and one of her regular clients. The first two are brought together by the light of a green laser pointer; there is a lot of surrealism in this film. It looks very nice, and the script’s very taut — but given the weirdness of the film,…
Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙), from Hong Kong, had its Canadian premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s the first film from director Kin Long Chan, who co-wrote the movie with Ryan Ling, and stars Ka Tung Lam (also known as Gordon Lam, a veteran actor and the screenwriter of Time, also at Fantasia 2021) as Kwan, a former member of the British armed forces in Hong Kong. After the British turn Hong Kong over to China, Kwan retires and…
“School Radio to Major Tom” (“こちら放送室よりトム少佐へ”, “Kochira Housoushitsu yori Tom Shosa e”) is a bittersweet story that becomes a tearjerker by the end. A 10-minute short written and directed by Chisaka Takuya and set in 1989, it follows Eisuke (Tokuma Kudo), a teen who broadcasts and records his own science-fictional radio drama about a certain Major Tom every morning at his school; one day he comes in to find a girl (Chika Arakawa) who attends night classes has added a…
The strangest title of any film at Fantasia 2021 was the Korean short “Digital Video Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro: The Real-World Guide to Set Up and Workflow.” (“그녀를 지우는 시간”) A 40-minute piece written and directed by Hong Seong-yoon, it opens with a scene from a romance movie as a young woman meets a handsome businessman — and then there’s a ghost. And the image freezes. And in a voice-over we hear the director, Seo, explain that his movie’s…
Out of Hong Kong comes Time (殺出個黃昏, Shā chū gè huánghūn), a film by Ricky Ko about a trio of elderly assassins. Written by Ching Yi Ho and Ka Tung Lam, it’s a character-based drama far more than it is an action movie, though it does start and end with action scenes. It’s also a showcase for some veteran Hong Kong actors, notably Petrina Fung Bo Bo (who the Fantasia program notes tell me was known as “the Shirley Temple…
On the 3rd Day (Al Tercer Día) is an excellent horror film from Argentina, based on the novel 3 días by Gonzalo Ventura. The book was turned into a script by Ventura with Alberto Fasce, and the adaptation directed by Daniel de la Vega. It’s from the same production company that brought the world last year’s The Undertaker’s Home (AKA The Funeral Home), and there are some passing similarities: both are well-shot films that have fun playing with traditional horror…
Prisoners of the Ghostland was one of the most anticipated films at Fantasia 2021. It unites madcap director Sion Sono (last seen at Fantasia with the feature version of Tokyo Vampire Hotel) with a certain mister Nicolas Cage. You might reasonably expect a full-throttle over-the-top ride. And that doesn’t quite happen. Written by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai, the movie takes place in a part of the world scarred by a spill of nuclear waste. A village called Samurai…
“Cuckoo!” is a 7-minute short film from the Netherlands directed by Jörgen Scholtens, who co-wrote with Jörgen Van Weeren. It’s a surreal piece about a tiny man (Frank Lammers) who lives in a cuckoo clock with his even tinier cat. He’s responsible for popping out on the hour, but one day things go wrong and lead to a cascade failure. It’s an absurd piece about routine, and it has a good production design involving old technologies. It’s a bittersweet story…
Satoshi Kon was one of the great geniuses of anime. Born in 1963, in his twenties he worked briefly in manga, then became an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo, scripting a segment in the anthology film Memories. The first movie of his own was Perfect Blue, in 1997, a suspense story about an actress pursued by a stalker. It blurs the line between real and unreal, which would become a hallmark of Kon’s later work — as with his next film,…