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| FANTASIA 2025 JURIED AWARDS |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
Burning by Radik Eshimov
Radik Eshimov’s Burning ignites more than a house—it sets alight the fragile scaffolding of truth, grief, and social perception in a small Kyrgyz village haunted by loss. With a Rashomon-style structure that fractures reality into three contradictory tellings, the film interrogates how power and prejudice shape what we believe—and what we choose to ignore. Anchored by mesmerizing performances from Aysanat Edigeeva, Ömürbek Izrailov, and Kalicha Seydalieva, each embodying three conflicting selves, Burning becomes a haunting palimpsest of memory and blame.
Kerim Kasymaliev’s cinematography is suffused with dread—kitchens throb with claustrophobia, forests seem to whisper, and a meal becomes a battleground of tone. Supernatural elements flicker at the edges, but it’s society’s quiet cruelties—the knowing looks, the whispered judgments—that deliver the deepest chills.
What burns here is not merely a home, but the illusion of certainty. Eshimov has crafted a bold, unsettling triumph: a domestic horror as intimate as it is political.
Lucid by Directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall
A howl from the lo-fi inferno of late-’90s angst, Lucid is a fever-dream excavation of creative paralysis, festering memory, and the stubborn myth of the tortured artist. Directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall unfurl their “coming of monster” tale with unapologetic audacity, fusing punk rock body horror, DIY surrealism, and collage-style nostalgia into something that feels equal parts MTV’s Oddities and Persona. Yet Lucid transcends homage—it’s a reckless, deeply sincere invocation of the artistic crucible.
Caitlin Acken Taylor is electric as Mia, a spiky, abrasive art student whose creative stagnation is both metaphor and menace. Her journey—catalyzed by a forbidden psychedelic candy from the exquisitely deadpan Syd (Mackenzie Lemire)—slithers between fractured memory and bloodied rebirth. At times Lucid teeters into indulgence, but its raw, unfiltered ambition is never less than riveting. Messy, hypnotic, and defiantly original, Lucid doesn’t ask for your approval—it dares you to look away.
Foreigner by writer-director Ava Maria Safai
In Foreigner, writer-director Ava Maria Safai channels the malevolent energies of early-2000s girlhood into a potent cinematic hex. Set in 2004—a year when the tyranny of thinness, blondness, and designer conformity stalked teenage girls through every screen and magazine—Safai’s debut feature reimagines the immigrant coming-of-age narrative as a folkloric horror with bubblegum polish and bite. Newcomer Yasamin (Rose Dehgan), a Persian teenager freshly arrived in Canada, finds herself courted by a clique of pastel-plated predators. Desperate to belong, she trades in her culture, her family, even her hair, bleaching herself into a ghostly simulacrum of Western ideals. But the transformation summons something ancient and furious. Safai doesn’t just riff on Mean Girls—she exorcises its anxieties, grounding the satire in lived immigrant grief and identity erasure. Visually lush and thematically searing, Foreigner is a monstrous fable of assimilation, and one of the boldest horror debuts in recent memory.
Shrimp Fried Rice (2025) by Dylan Pun
Move over, Remy—there’s a new tiny tyrant in the kitchen. Dylan Pun’s Shrimp Fried Rice is a 12-minute fever dream that grabs Ratatouille by the whiskers, slaps on a shrimp puppet, and deep-fries it into something strangely profound. This isn’t about food with shrimp—it’s food by shrimp. Equal parts culinary satire, workplace dramedy, and absurdist animal fantasy, it delivers bite-sized brilliance with zero filler. Boasting a foul-mouthed crustacean, an underappreciated human sidekick, and a literal rat race on a televised cook-off, cooks up pure chaos—and it’s delicious. Pixar, beware. The shrimp has entered the chat—and he’s not sharing his hat.
Headcase by Spencer Zimmerman
If Cronenberg and the D’Amelio sisters had a lovechild, it might look like Headcase—Spencer Zimmerman’s satirical scalpel of a short that slices through influencer culture with gruesome glee. Siobhan Connors plays Karen/Kylie, a ring-light-lit nightmare who turns a vehicular manslaughter mishap into a branding opportunity. As sharp as it is sick, Headcase dismembers both body and ego, proving virality can be murder. With Kevin Healey and Paul Telner steering the feature-length adaptation, Zimmerman’s blood-soaked fable of fame feels eerily poised for the algorithm. Like, comment, share—and maybe say a prayer. Headcase is ready for your feed, and your soul.
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*** PUBLIC'S CHOICE AWARDS / PRIX DU PUBLIC - PALMARÈS
MEILLEUR LONG MÉTRAGE INTERNATIONAL
Or : Flush (de Grégory Morin, France)
Argent : Fucktoys (D’Annapurna Sriram, États-Unis)
Bronze: Terrestrial (de Steve Pink, États-Unis) ex-aequo avec The Forbidden City (De Gabriele Mainetti, Italie)
MEILLEUR LONG MÉTRAGES D'ANIMATION
Or : La mort n’existe pas (De Félix Dufour-Laperrière, Québec)
Argent : I Am Frankelda (D’Arturo Ambriz et Roy Ambriz, Mexique)
Bronze : Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (De Kenji Nakamura et Kiyotaka Suzuki, Japon)
MEILLEUR LONG MÉTRAGE QUÉBÉCOIS
Or : Messy Legends (De Kelly Kay Hurcomb et James Watts, Canada)
Argent : Au Pied Du Mur (D’Alexandra Elkin, Canada)
Bronze : Anna Kiri (De Francis Bordeleau, Canada)
MEILLEUR LONG MÉTRAGE CANADIEN
Or : The Undertone (D’Ian Tuason, Canada)
Argent : Foreigner (D’Ava Maria Safai, Canada)
Bronze : Buffet Infinity (De Simon Glassman, Canada)
MEILLEUR LONG-MÉTRAGE ASIATIQUE
Or : Burning (De Radik Eshimov, Kirghizistan)
Argent : Hi-Five (De Kang Hyung-chul, Corée du Sud)
Bronze : I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn (De Kenichi Ugana, Japon)
MEILLEUR COURT MÉTRAGE INTERNATIONAL
Or : Let's Settle This! (De Jack Woon, Nouvelle-Zélande)
Argent : Steak Dinner (De Nathan Ginter, États-Unis) ex-aequo avec Skin (De Urvashi Pathania, États-Unis)
Bronze : Check Please (De Shane Chung, États-Unis) ex-aequo avec The Nightwalker (De Mark Reyes, États-Unis)
MEILLEUR COURT MÉTRAGE D'ANIMATION
Or : Loca! (D’Ion Miyamoto et Yuta Uchiya, Japon)
Argent : Mamiko’s Poop (De Yasuteru Ohno, Japon)
Bronze : Beyond The Trail (De Ryusei Hasegawa, Japon) ex-arquo avec Maybe Blue (De Zhou Qian, Chine)
MEILLEUR COURT MÉTRAGE QUÉBÉCOIS
Or : Duchess 17 (De Daly Sonesaksith, Canada)
Argent : Steal My Life (D’Annie Wren, Canada)
Bronze : Le Punk de Natashquan (De Nicolas Lachapelle, Canada)
MEILLEUR COURT MÉTRAGE CANADIEN
Or : The Sphinx (De Jesse Padveen, Canada)
Argent : Shrimp Fried Rice (De Dylan Pun, Canada)
Bronze : Heirlooms (De Dan Abramovici, Canada)
MEILLEUR COURT MÉTRAGE ASIATIQUE
Or : Floor (De Jo Ba-reun, Corée du Sud)
Argent : The Last Ride (De Yashoda Parthasarthy et Vijesh Rajan, Inde)
Bronze : Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension (De Koji Shiraishi, Japon)
PRIX L’ÉCRAN FANTASTIQUE
I Am Frankelda (Réal. Arturo Ambriz et Roy Ambriz, Mexique)
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