Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Her Private Hell’ Opens 30th Fantasia Festival

They’re back! The annual rampage of genre filmmakers, industry, and fans through the cinemas and social hubs of Montreal has begun, as the Fantasia International Film Festival opens its 30th edition on July 16 with Nicolas Winding Refn receiving the Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award before hosting the Canadian premiere of his sumptuously visceral, trope-defying thrill ride “Her Private Hell,” a Neon titl.

Refn emerged on the scene in 1996 with his influential feature debut “Pusher,” marking Mads Mikkelsen’s first big screen role, and ‘Pusher 3” had its North American premiere at Fantasia in 2006. His new feature, his first in a decade, hits North American big screens July 24.

“Returning to Fantasia 20 years after the ‘Pusher’ trilogy and receiving this award feels like stepping from black-and-white into color,” Refn tells Variety before the festival. “It’s a reminder that the journey is still unfolding—and it’s only getting better from here.”

Over 18 days, Fantasia unleashes an omnivorous global selection of 119 features and 400 shorts in an array of core and sidebar sections, and hosts Frontières, its convivial four-day co-production market and networking event, which has grown into a must-attend branded genre market destination at Cannes and Berlin and is also launching editions in Tokyo and Toronto this year. It’s also become an important spawning ground for Fantasia’s own programming.

“Every company you talk to wishes they had more genre on their slate,” Fantasia artistic director Mitch Davis tells Variety. “Every generalist festival, including the big A-list festivals, have their midnight and genre sections, and also have genre in just about every other section of their lineup.

“In the early days of Fantasia, we knew everything that was out or coming out but that has changed dramatically. What’s interesting now is that we have this pipeline with 30 years of alumni who keep us up to date with everything that they have or know about in development.”

In that spirit, Vancouver-based Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, who emerged from a blockbuster year (“Final Destination Bloodlines”) with a fistful of studio projects, revisit their indie roots with “Freaks Part II,” which premieres as Fantasia’s closing film.

The film picks up the story of tween-ager Chloe (Lorelei Olivia Mote), who can manipulate minds, and her mother (Amanda Crew) five years after the events in “Freaks,” the 2018 film that changed the writer-director duo’s career.

“We have incredible memories of our first “Freaks” movie playing at Fantasia in 2019,” Lipovsky tells Variety. “We were blown away that there was a line around the block for our little Canadian indie, which opened a lot of doors for us. So to return to the best genre festival in Canada and premiere the sequel to all our fellow freaks at Fantasia is a dream come true.”

“We’ve always loved genre filmmaking, so it’s exciting to see genre films taking over the mainstream,” adds Stein. “Audiences are more hooked on the fun theatrical experience of going to see genre movies in the theatre, sharing twists and surprises with a dark room full of strangers. It’s exciting to have the festival journey begin in Canada, before continuing on to the rest of the world.”

Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer Palm-winning slasher refresher “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” which screens July 17 and opens in North America in August, is generating the most excitement. “People lost their minds when we announced it because Jane is the most exciting filmmaker of their generation, a real poet of the genre,” says Davis.

Schoenbrun and star Hannah Einbinder (“Hacks”), who plays a filmmaker obsessed with rebooting an outdated slasher franchise and recasting its original final girl (Gillian Anderson), are hosting the screening and participating in a conversation the next day.

Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s (“The Lure”) highly anticipated world-premiering dystopian thriller “Hot Spot” (Focus), starring Noomi Rapace as a rebel cyber witch, is one of several high profile Frontières alums in this year’s lineup.

“It’s her biggest scale film to date, yet still the kind of film that only she could make—radical and experimental and takes all kinds of gigantic risks with the audience,” Davis says. “It’s starts as a futuristic police thriller and cautionary tale about AI surveillance, then becomes a stream-of-consciousness fever dream that grows crazier and crazier—she’s a rock star to our audience.”

Other notable Frontières alums include Andrea Corsini’s “Ferine” (formerly “Beasts of Prey”) which stars Carolyn Bracken (“Oddity”) as an art collector overcome by violent primal urges and is one of two Fantasia films scored by legendary Italian film composer Pino Donaggio (the other is “Her Private Hell”); Canadian Tim Riedel’s debut “Ancestral Beasts,” a haunted-house story exploring intergenerational trauma; Australian Mia’kate Russell’s debut “Penny Land Is Dead,” an ’80s-set summer revenge gorefest; and Minos Papas’s “Motherwitch,” a folk horror filmed on location in an abandoned village in Cyprus.

Aside from “Freaks Part II” and “Ancestral Beasts,” Canadian features premiering at Fantasia include: Casey Walker’s “Home Bodies” (twins living alone in an automated house receive an androgynous humanoid as a Christmas gift); Angus Silver’s coming-of-ager “Insectasy”; Ashlea Wessel’s debut “Junction Row,” a creature feature starring horror icon Katharine Isabelle (“Ginger Snaps”); Seth A Smith’s surreal take on the housing crisis “Permanent Damage,” starring Stephen Dorff; and Michael Gabriele’s Christmas horror comedy “Unholy Night.”

Highlights of the popular Les Fantastiques week-ends du cinéma québécois section include Wiebke Von Carolsfeld’s world premiering chiller “Someone’s Daughter,” following a lawyer (Pascale Bussières) and her former and increasingly sinister client (François Arnaud of “Heated Rivalry”) who are stranded together in the wilderness; Louis Gobbout’s “La Place,” in which an altercation over parking escalates into eerie dimensions; and Harrison Houde’s black comedy “Tight Lettuce,” co-written with actor Dakota Daulby (“Freaks,” “Longlegs”), who plays a young man dealing with his father’s drug addiction.

Davis notes that Fantasia audiences have also evolved over 30 years. “Today’s young audiences are ready for films that are going to shake them up, films that they’ll have to work with in a sense to engage with,” he says. “Times of crisis and massive global anxiety are when genre cinema tends to percolate.”