Fantasia 2025: a great mockery, everything heavy, everything that moves | Festivals and awards

Weird is the name of the game at Fantasia International Film Festival; You can always count on your choice of average festival to present a certain level of oddity, or excitement, or avant-garde experiment. (It’s revealing when the most normal The inscriptions of a film festival are the action thrillers soaked in blood; More about these as these dispatches progress.) But some of the festival’s strangest acid trips came thanks to these three following titles, pure-contract hallucinogenic experiences that do not ensure the conventions of the route or traditional naturalism, and rather that their monster does not care.

So let’s start with a beautifully filthy Australian Curio “A great mockery”, “ With the kind authorization of filmmakers based in Brisbane, Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs. History, as it is, concerns Josie (Dixon), an aimless loser who lives her repetitive days within the hipster limits of Brisbane: he wakes up, pours a cup of boxes in a box in a box and crosses his work of indie cinema. The first act locks us up in this routine, the choice of Dixon and Briggs to shoot on a super 8 mm film giving it the grainy and liminal sensation of a reality which has the impression of slowly separating from the seams. And indeed, as the film progresses, it is the case; Josie seems to be fighting with a goal, with a mental illness, with the limits of life with his tongue grandfather and the corpses of the cemetery to which he speaks in his free moments. (Yes, this is the kind of guy who spends his time hanging out in the cemeteries, his crib-Magnon crossed forehead and his long filandreous black hair making him look like a badly nourished Glenn Danzig.)

As the film progresses, these moments are repeated, with an increasingly large surreality, because the sense of calm of Josia stops outside the order. Mysterious growths are starting to form on his neck, beer and cigarettes are starting to flow more and more while Josia between increasingly vulnerable states, his body is collapsing more and more in a deadline. It looks like Brisbane, and his life within it, kills it slowly, and we are just left so that it happens slowly.

In this sense, “A Grand Mocker” is very successful, a fucked fever dream that dips you in the state of mind of someone’s honest existential rupture. Admittedly, this note is supported throughout the room, which may seem a little repetitive once you know where everything is going. However, the objective is less to bring Josie to a conclusive story than to sit in the rot and the dirt of the hipster scene of Brisbane. This is the kind of film that you feel more than analyzing. There is something here in the alienation of modernity, of an elementary desire to return to nature to escape all the horrors of civilization. No number of three -paper joints, vinyl discs, intimate moments with relatives can save you from a vacuum. For all his occasional moments of dark comedy, it’s a film that makes you feel sick.

In a slightly more irreverent context, we have the favorite independent film of Oklahoma, Mickey Reece, and his last, “Every heavy thing” A curious ode to journalism and technological thrillers of the 90s, with a large dose of contagious pleasure in its clumsy premise. I appreciated the idiosyncraties of Reece in the past: see “Agnes”, a thriller of exorcism which zags in the middle to follow a nun that comes out of the film in which she was, or “country gold”, which questions the generations confronted with country music through a vaguely lynched lens. “Every Huffing” is a little more relaxed and more openly comical than these, but still does not lose its surreal touches.

Here, Reece transforms her bizarre sensitivities to the rhythms of De Palma and David Lynch, with vintage sub-bits of the Polished Worker Society yielding to the dreamy nightmares and not a small amount of surreal humor. Our window on this world is Joe (Josh Fadem, making a great use of his twisted and confused expressions), the seller AD for a small hebdomedary of “Hightown City”, which ends up playing an inadvert role (horror Maven Barbara Crampton) during an evening with his boyfriend. (The shades of “Blue Velvet” there.) The maniac of Urbaniak wants him to participate in an “experience”: he cannot tell anyone what he saw here, and he will be dead in the hour if he does it. The problem is that his article begins to investigate the mysterious disappearances of several girls in town, and the new intrepid journalist Cheyenne (the newcomer Kaylene Snarsky) is doing it. He knows who did it; Can he keep his mouth closed while bodies accumulate?

“Every Huff” is light for a Reece image, but there are always funny signs of the American identifier Exposed: Joe’s father (the pillar of Reece Ben Hall) happily showing his appearance on a fireplace Youtube video, the neurlink-y science fiction diets that are under the case, etc. And in the middle is Joe’s Joe, a classic Palma protagonist who separates from seams with nervous energy, especially since William Shaffer of Urbaniak invades his dreams (returned with deliciously low VR effects which sell the comic surreality of his situation). Here, the realm of the internet, and digital communication, Become a Means of Confusion and Control, as Virtually Every Character is weighed down by some exploration or hidden Want or Expectation – All Except Joe, An Ordinary Man So Settled in His Own Life He Must Deal with the Consequences of Others’ Own Journeys (Urbaniak’s Tech Utopia, His Wife’s Budding Affair, An Old Friend [“People’s Joker” director Vera Drew] Reappearing after the transition to deduce that she thought he was crossing a similar journey).

Everything is very surprising and retrofuturistic, and unexpectedly. (A scene featuring a prison guard who humor the cries of Joe of Innocence is a real bust.) Mickey Reece continues to make films which, while the products of their influences, defy the description.

But perhaps it is advisable to go from Palma Pastiche to something approaching the nervous anarchy of John Waters, returning home in Chicago with indescribable of Alex Phillips “Everything that moves.” The follow-up of Phillips to “All Jacked Up and Full of Worms”, itself an excited and transgressive image, “everything that moves” begins with a sequence of hiking cherry in the woods between Liam (Hal Baum) and the young Julia (Jade Perry), encouraged by her sister, and the girlfriend of Liam, Thea (Jiana Nicole). The movement feels good; Her eyes light up, and passing over the edge, a projector radiates on his face, and the orchestral piccolos and the crescendo in tandem with her. It is the gift of orgasm that Liam brings, himself a sex worker who spends his days bicycle in the chicagoland region in a red control hide and forth, depositing sex and sandwiches on his list of customers (via a connection application that feels somewhere between sniffs and doordash).

It seems satisfied with his role, Phillips happily exchanging the roles of this type of image to demonstrate ease and care for male sex workers can wear for his customers, men and women. “Everything that moves” spends a lot of time taking a look at the equitable commodification of its sexuality and its occasional attempts to recover and hold it close. Take a first scene that feels torn from a certain number of porn of the 70s; The classic porn star, Ginger Lynn Allen, was rail in his house by the delivery man, Liam. But rather than dwelling on sex, we simply get the tail, and Phillips takes more care to check their post-sex sandwich to eat and its relaxed jokes.

They are not all grinders and grinding, however; There is a serial killer on the coward in the windy town, and Liam finds himself involved in the murders by some mismatched cops (Jack Dunphy and Frank V. Ross) who finger for the death of Julia’s father (Paul Gordon). The story is only vaguely interested in what, however, serving as a context for the various Liam meetings with Julia and the different Johns and Janes whom he meets throughout his work. There are golden glorinely deleted showers to accompany Gore’s rivers while the killer does his job, everything with a vibrant color and an urban grain of the director of photography Hunter Zimby. And, of course, a brilliant cinematographic orgasm after the other, like Liam does its thing with customers at all ends of genre and pineum spectra.

The opening credits are wooded by close -up of a dollar tickets with thick penis elegantly on them, a beautiful metaphor for exploration by the film of the intersections between sex and trade. But it is not a treatment at work of sex work either; “Everything that goes” is chaotic, hot and strangely sweet for its gusts of violence. Of course, there is a serial killer in freedom, but there is also a purity of heart in the embrace of Liam of sexual freedom and the solidarity of those who join him for their travels adapted to the folds. And it’s something to celebrate.