What sadist thought to give Austin, Texas’ Fantastic Fest and Montreal, Quebec’s Fantasia International Film Festival similar nomenclature while also scheduling them so close together on the calendar year? No matter. Fantastic Fest, where genre cinema meets dry-rubbed, slow-smoked anarchy, has a very different vibe from Fantasia, where genre cinema meets cobblestone cafe crawls; differentiating them on the surface isn’t difficult, and gets even easier when diving into their programs. In short, Fantasia’s goes bigger. After all: It’s international.

Fantasia’s 2024 edition makes good on the promise of its global scope, though the scope itself skews away from Asia’s biggest film industry drivers. Going by the data, for instance, either China or India is the continent’s largest film market; going by Fantasia’s program, those honors go either to Japan or South Korea, both of whom occupy significantly greater real estate throughout the festival compared to other Asian countries, accounting for both feature films and shorts. Why that’s the case is a question mark. (The answer could quite possibly come down to something as non-fantastical as geopolitics.) Shove concerns about disparate representation aside. Instead, marvel at the imagination displayed by Fantasia’s Asian offerings: Black comic morality tales, macabre supernatural horror, indefinable existential treatises, and cautionary stories about distilling your own spirits.

A Samurai in Time
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Distribution: TBD