Fantasia 2025: Mother of Mouches, Virgin of Lake Quarry, foreigner | Festivals and awards

While yesterday’s distribution also included a crowd of young women looking for comfort in the supernatural, it is a widespread trip for exploration here in Fantasia: witches, curses, folk tapestries woven through all the hormones, the pain and the uncertainty of adolescence. Here we are, with another trio of tales designed to express the joint pain of lust, loss and belonging.

First of all, we make a detour to the Catskills with one of Fantasia’s favorite families, the Adams, who have made a career from their particular brand of DIY films in a family gang in recent years. Parents John Adams and Toby Pose, as well as the daughter Zelda (and sometimes other Lulu girls), write, direct, edit, mark, produce and play in their own works; And if you have seen “more digging yourself” or “hellbender”, you know they feel so much more lively, superimposed and terrifying than your typical horror. Their last, “Mother of flies”, could well be their most assured, and also their most personal.

Drawing on the emotional wounds of the recent real battle for the family against cancer, the “flies” channeled who got upset in a three -day getaway in the depths of the woods for a father, Jake (John Adams), and his teenage girl, Mickey (Zelda Adams), the one who is dying of unknown cancer. The chemo and radiation did nothing, therefore in despair, the journey of the pair to the house of wood from the local witch Solveig (Toby Pose), which promises to cure his illness for free. However, it will take three days of rituals, faith and deep ruminations on the slim veil between life and death.

Since her first minutes, “Mother des Mouches” is a dark and meditative room of the room, although soaked in wood and blood and philosophical reflections on the nature of death (delivered with a frequent poster, as if he has launched a spell). When we see it for the first time, it is covered with blood, naked, twisted on the wood of the woods; It is the evocative imagery of a guy that Adams often revisits in their work but which finds a particular purchase here. Like so many folk witches before her, Solveig is herself a rejected woman, a cursed by the loss and the search for reparation and revenge in her particular ways. The way this believes in the journey of Mickey and the helplessness with which Jake looks at this course, provides a large part of the true terror of “flies”.

This helps, of course, that the Adams family seems really accomplished and skillful on both sides of the camera. The three tracks share the realization of realization, and their cinematography of bad mood (the bloody mixture of mud, blood and ritual) follows you in a distinct sense of dread. John is pretty good while the contrast of the right man watching such occultism unfold in front of him, but it is the prudent despair of the performance of Zelda, and the cunning regality of the work of posing, which carries a large part of the feeling of discomfort of the film. They are helped in a complex way by practical FX (some of which are supplied by FX Maestro Trey Lindsey), such as lots of rocks and tumordic fetus and piercing brambles connect the flesh to the diabolical alliance. It is really one to see, especially since it accumulates to his cute cute point.

Feeling a bit like the point of view of Lucrecia Martel on “Carrie”, Laura Casabé “The virgin of the career lake” is a slower, but no less spicy story, desire for adolescents and boiled rage. Located in Argentina in the summer in sweat 2001 (with internet cafes where people play “Quake II” or discuss on ICQ), the film transforms its bloody eye on Nati (Dolores Oliviero, piercing Eyes smoothing the decline in connection with his friend of the 90s friend (Alustín Sosa). Her friends, Josefina (Isabel Bracamon) and Mariela) (Candela Flores), share this crush, but nobody wants it only Nati.

The problem is that he started spending time with Silvia, twenty years old (Fernanda Echeverría), who self-states as breathtaking and effortless, with all his big stories of debauchery of a London year and an eclectic taste in music. Suddenly Dani knows that she cannot compete, and her jealousy burns as warm as summer heat, to the great dismay of her Abuela Las du Monde (Luisa Merelas). Pushed to hormonal madness, Dani’s flames begin, in a way that is both mysterious and bloody, to manifest in a way Silvia better to be careful, even if she tries to get into Diego’s friends by inviting them to a neighboring career with beautiful beaches and a tragic background.

There is a casualness and an ease of “the virgin of Lake Quarry” which makes it difficult to firmly snap the genre label on it. Of course, Dani’s waterproof animal animal comes out in a way that feels supernatural, even for Treed on magical realism (the power runs when it becomes too excited, or a boy’s bone to kiss him to cross a bridge drives to bite the lower lip). But he is lifted by the traditional rhythms of the history of the transition to adulthood, of a girl trying to give meaning to her emotions and to manage the rise and the fall of her first crush in a city struck with a drought which seems to fall out of the order itself. Olivero manages this capable, his ardent gaze showing the female gaze; She is short with her words, but her disappointment and her frustration say a lot. Her strongest communication comes in the crazy and bloody things that happen around her, successful killers who were invoked from nowhere. These are things that it could well be arranged to reality, whether through incantation, the curses of a local tramp or its own hot desire.

It is a dazzling although imperfect start, finding delicious notes among the nautical rhythms while you put your feet under you on what genres Casabé plays. But like the “flies” before him, he reached a crimson crescendo which seems to be able to his objectives.

As much as adolescent girls wish to love, they also wish to belong, this is where the horror comedy of the Fleet d’Ava Maria Safai “Stranger” Come, turning a story of “bad girls” / “Heathers” of adolescent policy and launching a large dose of supernatural horror and dramatic assimilation. Yasi (Rose Deghan) is an Iranian immigrant who recently moved to Vancouver with his father (Ashkan Nejati) and Grandmother (Maryan Sadeghi); Like so many first generation immigrants, she is torn between the traditions of her house and the desire to integrate into the girls of the school. Especially since the designated plastics of this school, led by the wicked daughter Rachel (Chloë MacLeod), continue to make comments apparently well -intentioned but ignorant for her (“you look a little Spanish”) which maintains it as a stranger.

She wants to integrate so much, to study the episodes of “Friends” to learn English (the film, in particular, gives us strange scenes of “friends” –as Sitcom, which was probably one thing of the rights but strengthens the disconnection that it feels between what it looks at and absorbs). But her greatest effort to belong to school comes with the decision to dye her blond hair so that she can look more like Rachel and her group of friends. But at each new stage towards the erasure of its Iranian identity, a new demon wakes up in it, the one that his family will have to stop before he swallows Yasi completely.

The first characteristic of Safai is charming in its deficity and relatntability, even as some wooden performance and some less than stellar effects at the end slightly attenuate the results. As the comedies go, they are not big shakes; What the jokes work are helped by the wonderfully fragile and vulnerable performances of Deghan, and, of course, the width and wisdom of Sadeghi as a grandmother of Yasi. But there is a sweetness in its objectives which makes it difficult not to like, in particular in the We-Put-On Vanity A show of its closing credits (with the notes of the director in the margins, thanking each crew member of the way they worked). A film that feels less than the sum of its parts, but which has intentions and visibility deeply rooted in the roots.