Dogs and cats kenneled at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”).
Anadromatic and inversive at its core, Dog of God (2025) is a provocative animation of Hell holding up a dark and grotesque mirror to Heaven. From its initial castration to its final transmogrified confrontation, Dog of God atmospherically conjures a 17th century witch trial in the Swedish Livonian village of Zaube using imaginative and beautifully-hued rotoscoped animation by Harijs Grundmanis. Phantasmagoric, feverish, orgiastic, perverse and unabashedly adult, Dog of God may not have the family draw of its Latvian co-hort Oscar® winner Flow, but—in my estimation—far exceeds Flow in narrative scope and technical execution. It is clearly a labor of love (or should I say lust?) from the Ābele brothers: Lauris serves as co-director, co-writer, composer and co-editor; Raitis as producer, co-director, co-writer, and co-editor; and Marcis as cinematographer.
As synopsized by Rupert Bottenberg for Fantasia: “In late 17th-century Livonia (the Baltic region, on modern-day maps), rule over a dismal, nameless backwater town is shared between a domineering priest and a decadent baron, each with his own cringing lackey to carry out their dishonorable errands. When a holy relic precious to the pastor vanishes, he casts blame upon the object of his secret lust, the tough but lovely tavern-keeper whose clandestine dabbling in esoteric medicinal alchemy invites suspicions of witchcraft. Meanwhile, an uncouth, otherworldly figure drifts ever closer to the town, bearing a gift of sorts, one sure to upend what faint traces of normalcy remain—the torn-off testicles of the Devil himself!”
As detailed at the film’s website: “The plot of the film Dog of God by the Ābele brothers is rooted in a historical event: the most famous werewolf trial in Northern Europe, the case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun, in which an 82-year-old man bravely declared himself a werewolf or a Dog of God during a trial in a church, recounting his battles against witches and wizards in the depths of hell.”
In other words, the werewolf in Dog of God is more shamanic than lycanthropic and is an agent of God rather than the Devil. I’m not sure what kind of distribution Dog of God can achieve in the United States whose Christian posturing resembles the cruel and hypocritical priest in Dog of God way too much, but it deserves widespread recognition for its scriptural and visual accomplishments and I sincerely hope it gains the audience it deserves.
Within the same domain of moon-jangled transmogrifications is the Fantasia World Premiere of Brock Bodell’s Hellcat (2025), commendable for the slow burn of its first half and the solid performances of its two main actors: Dakota Gorman, as Lena (a kidnapped woman who awakens inside a moving trailer unsure of how she got there and why she is wounded), and her captor Clive who seems genuinely concerned with helping her. Said performances competently carry the film to its conclusion, though murky cinematography and idle practical effects unfortunately weaken its final sequences.
As committed as the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”), now in their 29th edition, has been in securing the premiering edge of genre film from all around the world, recognizing and setting trends, they have likewise set their sights on paying tribute to and acknowledging influences from years past of projects that may have slipped under the radar of audience reception in recent decades. Nine entries in their Fantasia Retro sidebar addressed the need—and the entertainment—in taking a second look at these filmic forebearers. I profile three that I had the fortunate opportunity to view.
With The Devil’s Bride (1974) I can now check off my bucket list the Lithuanian musical I’ve been meaning to see. For that matter, it may be the only Lithuanian musical I will ever need to see, now that I’ve caught its North American premiere at Fantasia in a gorgeous restoration by the Lithuanian Film Centre. At the time of its release, The Devil’s Bride was one of the most successful and celebrated movies in the Lithuanian cinema of the Soviet era and its first rock opera, garnering comparisons to Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Tommy (1975), which both came out about the same time.
Based on the 1945 fantasy novel Baltaragis's Mill, the most notable work by writer, poet and political activist Kazys Boruta, and in turn based on Lithuanian folklore, the story carries hints of John Milton’s 1667 poem “Paradise Lost” (with rebellious angels exiled from Heaven) and Eastern European fairy tales involving the “rash promise” motif (such as in “Rumplestiltskin” where a miller’s daughter offers her first born in exchange for escaping death by being able to spin straw into gold). I don’t know what it is about millers and their daughters, but the same blind promise is granted in The Devil’s Bride.
Once Pinciukas (a puckish Gediminas Girvainis) has been demoted from disobedient angel to an exiled devil cast out of Heaven into the pond of the miller Baltaragis (Vasilijus Simčičius), he is captured and put to work at the mill. To lessen his work load, Pinciukas strikes a deal with Baltaragis, granting him success at the mill and the hand of the beautiful, melodius Marcelé (Vaiva Mainelytė), if he is awarded their first born. The boon backfires on the miller when Marcelé dies in childbirth and their daughter Jurga—the spitting image of her mother (and likewise played by Mainelytė)—is doomed to marry the devil. But in rides the dashingly handsome Girdvainis (Regimantas Adomaitis), he and Jurga fall in love, and Pinciukas is left warding off the advances of the miller’s sister Ursule, who the miller attempts to pawn off on him. When Ursule saves Pinciukas from a vengeful mob, his affections transfer to her, they marry and happily have children of their own.
Entirely sung, The Devil’s Bride requires cultural allowances. I can’t say the music was my idea of a rock opera, but I certainly enjoyed the colorful cinematography and Arūnas Žebriūnas’ zany, spirited direction.
The bloody kills of giallo cinema have long fascinated me with their fatal choreography and lurid beauty and—as familiar as I might be with the films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava—I’d not yet sampled the work of Pupi Avati, known for the giallo classic The House With Laughing Windows (1976). As noted by Kat Ellinger in Fantasia’s program notes: “While not inherently supernatural, the film belongs to a small but ever-so-sweet subset of the genre, giallo fantastico: works that stretch the genre’s core footing in thriller and mystery, moving instead toward surrealism and the avant garde.”
I knew something was up in the opening sequence. Ordinarily, giallo films—like many genre films—begin with the murder or the dead body of a woman. I’ve never quite understood the gendered necessity of this narrative trope, but can’t buck a lineage that stretches back decades. So it was a refreshing—if that word is appropriate—surprise when the film opens with a muscular man being tortured and stabbed with knives. That scenario segues into the painting of St. Sebastian who—instead of being pierced with arrows—has been martyred by sharp cutlery.
My gaydar kicked into high gear. You don’t introduce St. Sebastian without suggesting inversion or gender variance as some kind of perverse subplot and, sure enough, The House With Laughing Windows leads its male protagonist through several badly-lit if atmospheric set pieces in order to deliver a truly twisted joke at film’s end.
Again, from Kat Ellinger’s write-up, our protagonist Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) arrives in a seemingly sleepy village to restore the church mural of St. Sebastian—already disturbing in its replacement of arrows with knives—and finds himself drawn into chaotic and sinister scenarios, let alone the beds of every available woman in sight. Comparing Stefano to the male protagonist in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Ellinger writes: “Stefano is the outsider—a man of intellect and rational curiosity—entering a closed, rural world shaped by silence, denial, and local tradition. Here, the past is not a place of clarity, but a conduit for primordial madness and deadly intent.”
The Fantasia World Premiere of a 4K restoration of Robert Butler’s Night of the Juggler (1980), available for the first time in 40 years, plunges the viewer into the energized if politically incorrect moviemaking of the late ‘70s-early ‘80s when urban verisimilitude was captured by the gutter bigot-speak rampant before woke politics. I winced at some of the racist and sexist slurs hurled between characters even as I recognized they hit their marks.
Ex-cop Sean Boyd (James Brolin, at his hunkiest) spends the entire film chasing Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman, former Boys of the Band nelly turned perverse psychopath) because he’s kidnapped his daughter Kathy (Abbie Bluestone), on her birthday no less, mistaking her for his intended victim: the daughter of a wealthy real-estate magnate responsible for tearing down his families’ properties and decimating their livelihood. He wants a million dollars as recompense. It’s bad enough that Gus is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, but his gradual collapse into a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome where he becomes attracted to his teenage hostage feels genuinely icky, right down to the kiss. It leads me to wonder if this film wasn’t an influence on Donald Trump at 34 when he was first fielding questions about potentially running for President?
Supporting turns are solid. Richard Castellano as Lt. Tonelli has a comic steal when he samples frozen yogurt for the first time. Frozen yogurt, you might remember, was introduced to the United States in the 1970s. Mandy Patinkin, long before Barbra Streisand sang to him bathing naked, and before he nearly drove himself crazy painting dots on a canvas, has a brief, accent-laden cameo as Alessandro, a Puerto Rican cab driver with crazy driving skills and few good things to say about white people. Julie Carmen’s sensuous beauty as Maria, a street smart young clerk from the New York City dog pound, stole every scene she was in. Bug-eyed Dan Hedaya as Sergeant Barnes is—as Michael Gingold describes in his Fantasia program capsule—“juicily overacted.” Gingold also notes that an 11-year-old C. Thomas Howell served as Bluestone’s stunt double.
Finally, I have to admit that one of my favorite scenes in the film is when we’re allowed a peep into a 42nd Street peep show back when the Deuce wasn’t overrun by the horrifying throngs of tourists that inhabit Times Square today.
Skillfully pitched between sentiment and action, Stuntman (2024)—the debut feature from Herbert Leung Koon-Shun and Albert Leung Koon-Yiu—screened at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). While paying homage to the world of golden age Hong Kong stunts and kung fu, Stuntman manages to also deliver a family drama about a father seeking to reconcile with his estranged daughter, as well as debating the merits of the old school style of stunt work where safety was incidental to cinematic effect, and a newer school where stuntmen are protected by evolved industry standards.
Sam (Wei Tung, aka Stephen Tung) is an action choreographer committed to taking risks that endanger his stuntmen in an effort to create energized action films popular to the public. Intensely focused on filmmaking, Sam forfeits meaningful relationships with his wife and daughter and—when a stuntman is seriously injured and paralyzed on set—forfeits his reputation as well, becoming persona non grata in the Hong Kong action industry. No one wants to work with him. He’s given one last chance by a former colleague producing a final film but finds himself in conflict with a new generation of stuntmen willing to say no to proposed directions that might bring them harm. How then is he to achieve the glory and transcultural appeal of Hong Kong’s golden age of action filmmaking (the 1970s to the 1990s)?
Casting Stephen Tung as the aged action choreographer attempting to make a comeback is key here as Tung hardly needs to act the part, having been an action choreographer, actor and film director since the 1970s, working with the likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-Wai and winning the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography seven times: the most awarded individual in that category. Further, he is the head of the Hong Kong Stuntmen Association. He adds not only authenticity to his role, but a keen awareness of how stunt work has transitioned from Hong Kong’s golden age to the present.
What can be said of a person who—in the act of trying to conceal himself with a mask—reveals who he really is? I first tackled that conundrum when studying Dionysos, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, whose association with masks symbolized transformation and religious fervor. Masks in his cults and in Greek theatre, which he patronized, allowed wearers to assume new identities, from human to animal or from one gender to another, enabling a state of uninhibited behavior. Not to argue too much a case for cultural diffusion, but it also interests me that Hellenistic culture was transmitted to the region of Gandhara in ancient India, accounting for how Buddhist art has incorporated Dionysian imagery and narrative forms.
In his fourth film Hema Hema: Sing Me A Song While I Wait (2016) Bhutanese director and Buddhist Lama Khyentse Norbu continued developing the Buddhist cinema he almost single-handedly created. His filmic practice began with consultative work for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), followed six years later by his first feature film The Cup (1999); Travelers & Magicians (2003), the first full-length feature film shot in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan; and Vara: A Blessing (2013). All four films have strong festival pedigree as arthouse darlings. Hema Hema premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, made its festival rounds, and is finally being released theatrically by New York-based Dekanalog on Friday, August 8, 2025 at the Quad Cinema.
“Hema Hema” means “once upon a time” in native Dzongkha language and the English subtitle refers to a bardo state, a waiting room where departed souls pass before entering their next incarnation. Every twelve years an elder selects individuals to attend a ritual ceremony lasting a lunar cycle where they’re taught the concept of the bardo as they “prepare for the gap between death and birth”. Said preparation involves shedding one’s notion of identity by delving into the realm of anonymity, achieved through a required use of masks.
As articulated by Italian film critic Lorenzo Paci at Cinepaxy, the mask is “a device for establishing a community of anonymous individuals, without subjection or individuality, but also a mask to protect oneself from oneself, from one's own identity. Thus, one enters a role-playing game where the stakes are one's own life and that of others; one conforms to an otherness regardless of what one was, almost as if the ritual were a path to resurrection in another life, a chance to recreate oneself and escape the constant obligation of recognizing oneself. There is no longer any need to conform one's being to an identity, one's essence to matter; conforming to a precept means, in a certain sense, excluding it, denying it by subjecting oneself to it, in this case, reshaping oneself with a new consistency.”
“Anonymity is intoxicating,” the ceremonial elder teaches. “Anonymity is power. If you give away your identity, you give a way to power.” Donning masks, becoming faceless, allows the participants to be lascivious, playful and daring. Identity is understood to be a form of death and anonymity a rebirth. The narrative grip of the past, the thirst for fame and respect, are understood as the identity the ceremonial participants are tasked to relinquish.
At HighOnFilms, Nafees Ahmed extrapolates that people are “bucketing along to make our identity unique; donning ‘masks’ when required to make it possible in a world besieged by modern technology. Our virtual social presence matters the most. We have let these technologies define our life. We fear anonymity so much that our real self is lost while doing so.” Slaying this “earned” identity, Ahmed suggests, is what “lies at the heart of this spiritual elevating film.” Adriana Rosati furthers at AsianMoviePulse that, indeed, Norbu gained inspiration from chat rooms and social medias where users feel freedom of action behind the anonymity of their screens.
So I return to the conundrum originally posed. What if the anonymity that allegedly allows you to escape your identity, that essentially conceals it, actually results in unleashing it, revealing it, in dark, unexpected ways? What if the wisdom of a Buddhist teaching promoting rebirth becomes another form of death? As stated in their program note, Quad Cinema writes: “The Bhutanese lama and filmmaker, recognized by Tibetan Buddhists as the third incarnation of the founder of Khyentse lineage, imbues his films with a rare spiritual wisdom—though not at the expense of the traditional movie-going pleasures of spectacle, character, and suspense.”
Though the usage of masks in this film are not inherently Buddhist in practice, they fascinate; either through the inscrutable and expressionless mask of our main protagonist, as compared to the brightly painted, if garish, masks of other participants (some of the masks are hundreds of years old). Cinematographer Jigme Tenzing creates a vibrant palette of oranges and reds amidst the verdant greens of the southeastern locations in Bhutan, then switches to blues in the film’s urban scenes where the anonymity of dancers in a club rhymes with the ritual dances at the ceremonial retreat. The urban scenarios that bookend the film are also the ones that provoke the most unease, causing lingering ruminations on how beautiful teachings might be impossible to practice in our modern world of earned identities.
Sporting its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) after a robust festival run that included premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, South by Southwest, Frameline, Overlook and Night Visions, Addison Heimann’s Touch Me (2025) offers up an incredible premise tempered by credible acting. Understood as a satirical reflection on the traumatic underpinnings of addiction, codependency, lust, toxic relationships, and body horror, I viewed Touch Me at about the same time that I caught James Gunn’s latest iteration of Superman (2025) and that chance collision provoked questions and insights.
Let’s talk frankly about intergalactic interspecies sex, shall we? Whereas miscegenation references sex between races, and interspecies mating refers to sex between Earthen species, there doesn’t appear to be a specific term for intercourse between humans and space aliens, though genre provides a means of imagining it. Which is exactly the response I got when I Googled it (yes, I Googled it). “There's no definitive scientific term for breeding between humans and hypothetical alien species because it's currently considered impossible and exists mostly within the realm of science fiction,” Google advises. So science fiction it is.
Whereas Candy Clark freaked out by the prospect when David Bowie attempted sex in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) can’t get enough of it in Touch Me. Can you blame them? Their alien tryst Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) dispenses a euphoric toxin to all those he touches that obliviates the psychological anxieties engendered by past trauma. Aware of his gift, Brian manipulates his human lovers with shifting offers of interspecies intercourse or—in the case of his assistant Laura (Marlene Forte)—its denial. The fact that sex with Brian is not only spectacular but tentacular assures that all three humans are trembling with lust. Why he’s being so polyamorous belies a sinister agenda.
Jump to Superman, restrained by pandering to general summer audiences with the palliative of intergalactic interspecies romance. Oh, brother. Not only has Gunn’s version of Superman and David Corenswet’s characterization been criticized for being too “woke”, but his saving of a squirrel was almost more than I could handle (admittedly, I hate squirrels and think they all should die insufferable deaths). My disgruntlement is only because we all know what has been on everyone’s minds since Superman’s strapping good looks and pronounced assets attracted Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). Presumably, the two are a number and I find it hard to believe that Lois could be satisfied with floating around mid-air with her Kryptonian exile. I mean, c’mon. Is she getting it good? Can she take it?
So kudos to Addison Heimann for pulling no punches and fantasizing not only on Joey and Craig being suspended in mid-air, intoxicated by the drug introduced into their bodies from Brian’s touch, and no doubt penetrated by those … endowed tentacles; but, even further, to discover (SPOILER ALERT) that it’s not Joey who can be impregnated by alien sperm (I’m presuming it’s sperm) but Craig, which—I don’t know—suggests what? The dangers of gay sex? I recommend you watch Touch Me on your own while I chance a cold shower.
Back to Google: “It's important to remember that for any actual interspecies breeding to occur, there would need to be a significant degree of biological compatibility between the two species. This is considered highly unlikely with genuinely alien life forms due to vast differences in genetics and evolutionary paths. In most fictional scenarios, any such breeding would likely be achieved through advanced genetic engineering rather than natural reproduction.”
Heimann eschews “genetic engineering” for bumping uglies and, again, I laud him for that. Otherwise we’d be languishing in the anemic romance of Superman. So before I take my cold shower, I’d like to touch for a moment (pun intended) on the character of Craig, a not-entirely-likeable trust fund slacker. Representation holds an inherent conundrum: you have to know enough about yourself and any group with which you identify in order to be able to represent yourself as a constituent of that group; and, often, how you come to know yourself is through the example, or the guidance, of that group’s representation. It’s something of a feedback loop: identity and representation.
Gay males of my generation, by example, were offered a feedback loop of evolving media to find ourselves, see ourselves, and identify ourselves writ large projected onto the silver screen or represented on the living room screen of television. Queer scholars much more accomplished than me have studied how television seems to be the first medium where challenges to representation are first addressed and where the nature of representation itself begins to evolve. Movies tend to follow suit much later, tending to be conservative mouthpieces for the status quo, being reluctant to hazard box office. So here we have Craig, impregnated by an alien (God-knows-how) and I seriously don’t quite know what I’m supposed to do with this risk of representation that Heimann has taken. Suffice it to say that I’m glad I’m in my elder years and exhausted with influences.
In contrast to the Korean psychological thrillers slated in the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) via Finecut distributors, Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025) and Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025) represent the opposite end of the genre spectrum with spectacular optics aimed at pop cultural trends, namely webtoons.
The Canadian premiere of director and co-writer Kim Byung-woo’s Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025) brings to Fantasia’s big screen the addictive pleasures of smartphone webtoons, the episodic digital comics (i.e., web novels) originating in South Korea that have gained in international popularity through easy internet access. Adapted from singNsong's eponymous webtoon (singNsong being the pseudonym for the married couple who co-authored the popular web novel (i.e., manhwa) "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint" and "The World After the Fall"), Byung-woo’s filmic treatment holds true to the manhwa’s premise of a fan’s unexpected immersion into the world that he has read about faithfully for years while commuting to and from work.
As events in his manhwa begin to suddenly play out in his “real” life in Seoul, shy, discreet office worker Dok-ja (award-winning K-drama star Hahn Hyo-seop) has the advantage—as the manhwa’s most devoted reader—of knowing what’s going to happen before it happens and who the key players are. Knowing the rules of this digital universe inside-out, Dok-ja seeks to help his fellow Seoulians but rapidly discovers that omniscience doesn’t mean he can be a passive observer. Just because he is omniscient does not mean he’s a god; only the author—Dok-ja understands—is god, but the author is giving him an opportunity to rewrite the manhwa’s ending. In order to do so, Dok-ja has to engage in the events unfolding before him, acquiring power through video game acuity and skill, and adjusting to the dangerous shift from familiar events to the unfamiliar. Knowing that in the original manhwa everyone dies when the omnipotent hero Jung-hyeok (Lee Min-ho) dies, Dok-ja realizes he must change the ending of the story and make the story his own if he is to survive. His challenge is to convince Jung-hyeok, who disbelieves that a mere reader can alter the manhwa’s narrative trajectory.
Although death games have been part of the filmic landscape since Kinji Fukasaku shocked the filmic world with Battle Royale (2000), audiences have come to enjoy the myriad ways in which young characters battle it out in inventive scenarios, whether Hunger Games, or more recently Squid Game. But Omniscient Reader leans into new territory with its meld of Korean pop culture with folklore. An overtly cute but sinister dokkaebi (a mischievous, goblin-like creature with supernatural powers) introduces the ground rules of the scenarios that will determine the fate of humanity caught in Dok-ja’s manhwa-made-“real”; a reality adjudicated by “Constellations” out in space who are bemused by the follies of the human race and seek to either favor them with sponsorship or punish them.
The special effects are spectacular and the action sequences exciting: giant sea monsters sever bridges, an ichthyosaur swallows our protagonist whole (like an Irwin Allen retro-update), a giant praying mantis pursues him, as do tentacle-faced demons, and the film’s final scenario is a mind-blowing stand-off with a Luciferian fire dragon in a Seoul subway station. This adrenalin-paced Korean blockbuster fully satisfies.
With his first feature Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025) boasting its Quebecois premiere at Fantasia, director and screenwriter Lim Dae-hee faithfully adapts yet another of South Korea’s most popular webtoons, “Holy Night: The Zero”, whose synopsis reads: “Raised as brothers in an orphanage, Bawoo and Joseph take opposite paths—Joseph becoming a priest and Bawoo becoming an underground fighting champion. However, when Joseph awakens as the great demon Lucifer and massacres the residents of their orphanage, their brotherly relationship turns into one fueled by revenge. In order to bring Joseph to justice, Bawoo sets off on a relentless pursuit of him and his cult. As threats mount and doubts creep in, can Bawoo’s powerful fists and allies overcome Joseph’s overwhelming supernatural powers and influence?”
Though thoroughly and successfully aimed at sheer kinetic entertainment, Holy Night’s Catholic underpinnings made me question the religion’s presence in South Korea. I discovered that Catholicism is the second largest Christian denomination after Protestantism, with approximately 11% of the population identifying as Catholic. Thus, it was not at all out of the ordinary that a trio of extraordinary exorcists called Holy Night would have ample opportunity to pull out all the stops and chew up the scenery with the ritual tropes familiar to American audiences through The Exorcist franchise: you know, the possessed girl with stringy hair bound to a chair duplicitly preying upon the psychological frailties of her captors, the sudden drops to sub-zero temperatures whenever evil enters the room, the cussing, the agonized screaming as the exorcists demand the demon leave the girl’s body, demand the demon name itself, the guilt tripping, the possessed girl suddenly breaking free and skittering crab-like down the hall and up the wall, all those things fearful Catholics pray will not harm them.
I laughed outloud when one of the exorcists pointedly asks a demon: “Are you Korean?” (That’s what actually prompted me to investigate Catholicism’s presence in South Korea; I mean, it seemed like such a sensible and honest question and I wanted to know the answer.)
Kudos to Lim Dae-hee’s animated coda that honors and provides a visual sense of the webtoon format.
Kyrgyzstan, officially the Kyrgyz Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Asia lying in the Tian Shan and Pamir mountain ranges. Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north. Kazakhstan, also in Central Asia, is a former Soviet republic that extends from the Caspian Sea in the west to the Altai Mountains at its eastern border with China and Russia. Kyrgyz is the official language of Kyrgyzstan and Ov Kazakh and Russian share the honors in Kazakhstan. Represented by films at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”), English subtitles have enabled my access to two compelling visions from Central Asia.
First is the North American premiere of Radik Eshimov’s Burning (2024) from Kyrgyzstan. As admirable as Burning is with its Rashomon-inflects, let alone its tip of the hat to the paranoic panic of Rosemary’s Baby and the emetic horror of The Exorcist, it is the film’s final freeze frame that most unnerved me; its direct address of a woman staring straight at the audience, the fourth wall collapsed, with a look that is both condemnatory and pitying, frightened and angry, as if asking: “What do you think? What version of these events will you accept? What misogyny will you hide behind?”
Burning is, arguably, less about telling a story from different narrative points of view than it is an examination of the narratives purposely chosen to interpret an isolated event; in this case, a house that has caught on fire. The question for discussion is who is responsible? There are three suspects: Asel (Aysanat Edigeeva), a woman still mourning the recent loss of her son; her husband Marat (Ömürbek Izrailov); and her mother-in-law Farida (Kalicha Seydalieva). In all three versions of the story there is no question that it’s Asel who actually starts the fire, though the suggestion is that she’s not necessarily to blame. I would argue that Eshimov has all but assured the viewer’s choice of who is actually responsible for the tragedy, but not without first taking note of the witch hunts embedded in masculine prerogative. Whether it’s Uncle Jrygal seeing mother-in-law Farida as a weird Ice Queen casting mumbo-jumbo spells, or the neighbor who pities his friend Marat for having a wife who is possessed by a djinn, or Marat himself furious at his wife for the death of their child, it is Burning’s concluding freezeframe that confronts the viewer to adjudicate the conflicting evidence.
Burning is also an object study. Pay attention to the narrative trajectory of the red cigarette lighter.
Also boasting a North American premiere in Fantasia’s Cheval Noir flagship section, is Kazakhstani Yerden Telemissov’s debut feature Stinker / Sasyz (2025). In his transition from actor to director, Telemissov delivers a heartfelt, adorable narrative about an alien (Chingiz Kapin) who has crashed on Earth, taken refuge in a roadside outhouse to avoid the sun, and befriended a homeless elder Sadyk (Bakhytzhan Alpeis), a disgruntled shopkeeper Nadya (Irka Abdulmanova), and her granddaughter Aminia (Ailin Sultangazina) who—during the course of their burgeoning alliance—form a supportive and loving intergalactic family.
Similar to E.T.’s phoning home, the alien needs to find an earthly metal that will activate his “radio” so he can call for rescue. Thwarting his newly-found friends’ efforts to help him is a draconian mayor with political ambitions and his assistant, a not-too-bright police officer who believes YouTube has proven that—not only is Earth the center of the universe—but it’s flat (and in a brilliant comic flourish the alien proves him wrong).
This is a lovely, funny, and sentimental film with great practical effects and solid acting all around. It speaks to how we each must come to terms with accepting others and, by doing so, heal ourselves. At film’s beginning Sadyk is suicidal and wants desperately to kill himself, having lost his beloved wife. Each dark attempt fails humorously, though while attempting to hang himself he sees the alien ship crash in the distance. Shopkeeper Nadya is life-weary and wants simply to live her life out without issue. Befriending an alien is exactly what they both need.
As Theodoor Steen has dispatched to Screen Anarchy from the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival, during the Q&A session following the World Premiere screening of Toshiaki Toyoda’s Transcending Dimensions (2025), Toyoda insinuated that his eleventh feature film might be his last. Which—being the first film I’ve seen from Toyoda’s oeuvre—makes me feel a bit awkward as, unlike those more familiar with his output, I don’t know how Transcending Dimensions builds upon his past work. Regardless, I can only take Transcending Dimensions at face value and hope that future opportunity will allow me to go back and see Toyoda’s first ten.
As synopsized by the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”), where Transcending Dimensions is having its Canadian premiere, “At the mountainous retreat of sinister, sadistic cult leader Master Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), a cluster of credulous souls have gathered for guidance towards spiritual enlightenment. Among them, however, is nihilistic hitman Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda) and his client Nonoka (Haruka Imô), who holds Hanzo responsible for the disappearance of her boyfriend Rosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka). Despite Nonoka’s sudden and inexplicable suicide, Shinno elects to honor the contract, but that’s quickly revealed to be no simple task. A formidable sorcerer, Hanzo is only delighted by the challenge of his new adversary, and the true circumstances of ascetic seeker Rosuke are far more uncanny than one might imagine...”
It was the immediate contrast between the characterizations of Hanzo and Shinno that caught my attention; Hanzo being an over-the-top blonde-haired cult leader, both sinister and elusive, and Shinno being a near-inscrutable hitman, determined but restrained, intent on bringing Hanzo down. Apparently, this theme of cult leaders in conflict with criminals is an established theme of Toyoda’s, already popular in Japanese underground film culture, and an effective way to blend the genres of gangster crime narratives with fantasy sci-fi. This affords a satisfying measure of on-screen violence, diffused by head-scratching mystical and philosophical forays into the epistemological and spiritual underpinnings of existence, represented by a visually stunning Kubrick-like flight through outer space to the edges of the universe where a prismatic reflective setpiece captures a Lynchian weirdness pitched at just the right shade of strange. It’s all puzzling, beautiful, and compelling, with visual and scriptural iterations that layer over each other so that you never feel that you’re achieving an answer even as you are very much enjoying exploring the question.
Pondering the mysteries of the universe and not being able to arrive at any conclusion strikes me as fundamentally honest, however, and what’s real or not hardly matters when the goal is to transcend such categories.
As much a study of characters who are sharply-defined archetypes, or—as Chris Knipp writes in his review—"almost like chess pieces”, Transcending Dimensions is likewise an effective object study, profiling a Triton conch shell in all its rich mythic attribution.
Triton shells, particularly those used as trumpets, hold significant symbolic meaning in various cultures and mythologies, associated with power and a connection between the divine and natural world. Ritually, they facilitate communication with the spirit world. The deep, resonant sound produced by blowing into a triton shell trumpet is believed to awaken the mind, enhance positive vibrations like hope and courage, and facilitate spiritual insights and communication with the divine. Both Hinduism and Buddhism associate the blowing of the conch shell with purifying the environment, dispelling negativity, and inviting good fortune. The spiral shape of the conch shell is often interpreted as a symbol of infinity and the cyclical nature of life. Its complex interior is seen as representing the inner self, encouraging self-reflection and spiritual growth. So it is the perfect object to presage the act of transcendence pursued in this film, particularly across dimensions.
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