FANTASIA 2025 • The Final Note

FANTASIA 2025 JURIED AWARDS

FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche

TRAILER

 Reflection in a Dead Diamond 

In Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani don’t just riff on Eurospy aesthetics—they incinerate them, crafting a lush cinematic hallucination where pulp nostalgia combusts into pop-art delirium. This is genre as fever dream: dazzling, deliciously perverse, and defiantly untethered from narrative orthodoxy. Fabio Testi, the aging spy whose past flickers in celluloid shards, lends gravitas to a film that revels in fragmentation. His face, carved by time and regret, anchors an opulent storm of leather, chrome, and bloodied fishhooks. If memory is the true enemy, then Serpentik—his latex-clad nemesis—is its avatar, slicing through reverie with cobra’s-kiss cruelty. Cattet and Forzani evoke Diabolik and Danger: Diabolik, but detour into something bolder: a spy thriller as death-haunted collage, a fugue of eroticized violence and vanishing identities. Narrative coherence is abandoned, but in its place: obsession, texture, and the giddy freedom of pure, unrepentant cinema. A breath of warped, intoxicating air. I LOVED IT!

TRAILER

The Forbidden City 

Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City detonates like a firecracker in the cobbled heart of Rome, a kinetic, genre-defying marvel that fuses operatic Italian melodrama with razor-sharp martial arts bravura. It begins in rural China, but it’s Piazza Vittorio—a real, beating, immigrant Rome—that becomes the unlikely crucible for a story of betrayal, resilience, and cultural collision. In Yaxi Liu’s Mei, we find a heroine as unyielding as she is haunted: a sister, a fighter, a force. Liu, in a breakout performance that rivals Michelle Yeoh’s finest hours, crackles with purpose, improvising weapons from cutlery and flower stalls, dismembering patriarchy one roundhouse at a time.

Yet The Forbidden City is not merely action spectacle. Enrico Borello’s Marcello is soulful, wounded, and wonderfully understated, and Paolo Carnera’s cinematography lends the city a bruised romanticism. Mainetti directs with symphonic flair, delivering a crowd-pleasing knockout that lingers in the heart—and in the gut. WE LOVED IT!

TRAILER

The Woman 

Hwang Wook’s The Woman begins with something as innocuous as a secondhand vacuum cleaner and ends in the fog of existential dread. This eerie, tightly-coiled psychological thriller—having its world premiere at Fantasia—unfurls like a bad dream remembered too vividly, each detail laced with the uncanny. Han Hye-ji delivers a staggering performance as Sun-kyung, a woman whose ordinary gesture—a box of strawberries to thank a stranger—spirals into a queasy investigation of grief, guilt, and suspicion. Wook, whose genre-hopping audacity thrilled audiences with Mash Ville, trades black comedy for creeping unease, constructing a narrative that feels both tactile and disorienting. He builds dread not with jump scares but with poisoned vitamin drinks, clumps of hair, and a stranger’s sticky fingers shoving berries into his mouth. Reality buckles under the weight of dreams and paranoia. Kurosawa-esque in tone yet defiantly its own, The Woman is a triumph of mood, ambiguity, and fractured truth. CRAZY

TRAILER

The Girl Who Stole Time

In The Girl Who Stole Time, writer-directors Yu Ao and Zhou Tienan craft a kaleidoscopic elegy to fleeting moments and impossible dreams. This animated fantasy, lush with 1930s Shanghai-inspired grandeur, marries time-travel spectacle with aching human tenderness. Qian Xiao, a wide-eyed stowaway armed with a magical timepiece, dances between paused seconds and high-speed escapades—but the heart of the film beats in her unlikely bond with Seventeen, a fastidious assassin thawed by her luminous spirit. While early plot turns feel familiar, the film’s emotional undercurrent—rooted in personal grief—swells into something quietly devastating. Gorgeous CG vistas and balletic fight sequences dazzle, but it’s in small, fragile pauses that the story glows. A cinephile’s ode to memory, love, and the desire to freeze joy, The Girl Who Stole Time reminds us that while time slips away, the moments we steal back—through laughter, through love, through film—are what make us human. A BIG SCREEN MUST SEE!

TRAILER

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy

In Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, director Kim Byung-woo translates the apocalyptic chaos of a beloved webtoon into a breathless cinematic battleground—equal parts creature feature, gamer odyssey, and existential satire. The premise is ingenious: a meek salaryman finds his mundane subway ride hijacked by a reality-bending invasion that eerily mirrors the online novel he's devoted a decade to reading. As laser-eyed dokkaebi demand blood and a leviathan rises from the Han River, Hahn Hyo-seop’s Dok-ja becomes an unlikely savior, navigating a gamified world with encyclopedic foresight and aching humanity.

While the film falters in narrative clarity—struggling to choose between metafictional commentary and straight genre thrills—it pulses with visual flair, buoyed by Jun Hey-jin’s kinetic lensing and Mowg’s thunderous score. This is spectacle with soul, a maximalist homage to Battle Royale and The Host, yes—but also a mirror held to the lonely reader, dreaming of agency in a world that rarely offers it. It deserves a crowd. COMING SOON TO MUBI

TRAILER

Like a Bosch nightmare filtered through Baltic black comedy and set ablaze by clerical lust, Dog of God is a pagan scream from the mud-soaked subconscious of 17th-century Livonia. The Abele brothers' animated debut is a pungent, operatically grotesque fable—part scatological burlesque, part moral reckoning—that charts the spiritual decay of a village ruled by gluttonous power and repressed desire. Anchored by uncanny rotoscoping that evokes both The Spine of Night and Bakshi’s darkest visions, the film lurches between gallows humor and apocalyptic satire with unnerving ease. Religious hypocrisy, sexual cruelty, and mythic animalism intertwine when a ragged werewolf prophet lopes into town bearing the Devil’s severed manhood as a catalyst for chaos and revelation. Visually ravishing in its ugliness and sonically unsettling with Lauris Abele’s pulsing score, Dog of God is no gentle parable but a transgressive, mordantly funny exorcism of piety and power—cult cinema in its most heretical, electrifying form. YIKES!

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

Titanic : Un Voyage Immersif — Une Odyssée Sensorielle au Cœur d’un Mythe Éternel

Ce qui m'a plu le plus est l'effet optique réalisé avec les photos en haute définition combinées avec des constructions physiques.

ENGLISH translation app left

Parmi les expositions itinérantes marquantes de la dernière décennie, rares sont celles qui parviennent à conjuguer précision historique, expérience sensorielle et émotion brute. Titanic : Un Voyage Immersif, présentée à Montréal par Exhibition Hub en partenariat avec Fever, relève brillamment ce pari. À mi-chemin entre le théâtre documentaire, l’installation technologique et le pèlerinage mémoriel, cette exposition s’impose comme un modèle du genre — aussi exigeante qu’accessible, aussi spectaculaire que sensible.

Après avoir conquis Milan, Copenhague, Atlanta, Toronto et d'autres métropoles mondiales, l'exposition accoste enfin à la Place Bonaventure de Montréal, dès le 29 juillet, où elle sera visible jusqu’au 26 octobre. 

Ce qui distingue Titanic : Un Voyage Immersif des nombreuses autres tentatives de commémoration, c’est sa forme narrative élargie et sa capacité à convoquer les émotions sans céder au mélodrame. Conçue comme une fresque en trois actes — ascension, splendeur, chute —, l’exposition propose un parcours scénographié avec une rigueur dramaturgique digne des meilleures productions théâtrales. L’histoire du Titanic y est traitée non comme une tragédie isolée, mais comme un miroir de son époque : l’orgueil industriel, la foi dans le progrès, la rigidité des classes sociales… jusqu’à l’aveuglement fatal.

Le visiteur évolue dans une série de décors grandeur nature, dont la reconstitution du Grand Escalier — emblème du paquebot, immortalisé par James Cameron — constitue le point culminant. Des cabines de première classe en acajou aux chaufferies suffocantes, chaque espace recrée l’ambiance du Titanic avec un souci du détail maniaque. Ce n’est pas une simple visite : c’est une traversée.

Mais là où Exhibition Hub excelle, c’est dans sa capacité à intégrer les technologies immersives sans en faire des gadgets. Projections à 360°, ambiance sonore spatialisée, odeurs reconstituées, jeux de lumière et même brise marine simulée sur le pont avant : tous ces éléments participent à une expérience multisensorielle cohérente, jamais tapageuse. Le but n’est pas de distraire, mais d’habiter l’histoire. De la ressentir.

Une section en réalité virtuelle, accessible pour un supplément modique, permet une descente vertigineuse dans les abysses de l’Atlantique Nord, là où repose aujourd’hui l’épave du Titanic. Équipé d’un casque, le visiteur explore les profondeurs dans un silence bleu nuit, presque liturgique. Ce n’est plus de la technologie : c’est de la poésie subaquatique.

Au cœur de l’exposition, plus de 300 objets originaux issus du Titanic et de ses navires jumeaux — l’Olympic et le Britannic — ainsi que du Carpathia (le navire sauveur) et du Californian (resté silencieux) sont présentés. Ces artefacts proviennent de deux des plus importantes collections privées au monde, celles de Kevin Saucier et Spencer Knarr, qui ont prêté ces trésors avec une générosité rare.

Ces objets — une montre arrêtée, un menu de première classe, un gilet de sauvetage, de la porcelaine estampillée — ne sont pas de simples vestiges. Ils sont les échos tangibles d’histoires humaines. On pense, en les observant, à ceux qui les ont tenus, portés, perdus. Ces fragments agissent comme autant d’épiphanies silencieuses.

L’exposition prend soin de ne pas se figer dans la seule nuit du 14 au 15 avril 1912. Elle explore aussi les contextes périphériques : la dérive de l’iceberg, retracée en animation, ou le rôle du Carpathia dans le sauvetage des survivants. Ce déplacement du regard, au-delà de l’événement central, permet une compréhension plus large, plus nuancée. On sort du mythe pour entrer dans l’histoire.

Mais le mythe n’est jamais loin. L’exposition ne se cache pas de faire référence à l’univers de Cameron — on entend parfois une variation du thème de James Horner. Et pourtant, au lieu d’être un effet racoleur, cette inclusion s’avère judicieuse : elle sert de pont entre mémoire populaire et vérité historique, entre émotion collective et documentation rigoureuse.

John Zaller, producteur exécutif chez Exhibition Hub, résume bien l’ambition du projet : « Nous sommes ravis de raconter cette histoire immortelle à notre manière, humaine et immersive. » Pour Spencer Knarr, collaborer à une telle exposition allait de soi : « C’est une belle manière de sortir des vitrines classiques. Certains collectionneurs gardent leurs trésors cachés, d’autres, comme nous, souhaitent les partager avec le monde. »

Kevin Saucier renchérit : « Une seule rencontre avec John Zaller a suffi à me convaincre d’embarquer. » Ce désir de partage, d’ouverture, irrigue tout le projet.

En filigrane, Titanic : Un Voyage Immersif interroge notre rapport au progrès, à la technologie, à l’arrogance humaine. Le Titanic, monument de la modernité triomphante, n’a pas seulement sombré sous la glace — il a coulé sous le poids de son hubris. Et c’est peut-être là que l’exposition atteint son sommet : dans sa capacité à faire du passé une mise en garde pour le présent.

Les résonances avec notre monde contemporain — crises climatiques, inégalités sociales, fascination pour les records techniques — sont là, implicites mais puissantes. L’exposition devient un miroir. Un avertissement. Une méditation sur la fragilité.

Titanic : Un Voyage Immersif n’est pas qu’une exposition. C’est une expérience totale. Une odyssée intérieure. Chaque salle est une escale, chaque artefact une rencontre, chaque souffle sonore un rappel. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de comprendre ce qui s’est passé en 1912. Il s’agit de ressentir. De se souvenir. De s’interroger.

Et cela, Exhibition Hub l’a parfaitement compris : les grandes histoires ne meurent jamais. Elles se réincarnent. Elles nous parlent encore, si l’on prend le temps de les écouter.

À voir jusqu’au 26 octobre 2025 à la Place Bonaventure, Montréal.

 Infos et Billets

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox 

Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

FANTASIA 2025 • Amélie Ravalec 's Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

FANTASIA

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

In a hundred minutes of blistering archival imagery, haunting testimonies, and mesmerizing audiovisual detours, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, the latest work by French documentarian Amélie Ravalec, lifts the veil on one of the most thrilling, radical, and under-documented art movements of the 20th century. This is not just a film—it is a rapture, a time portal, and a scream of remembrance for the uncontainable creativity that emerged from the scorched soil of postwar Japan.

Amélie Ravalec during the Q&A at Fantasia Fest. A book will follow in September 2025 HERE
Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

Ravalec is no stranger to the subterranean: her earlier works, Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay and Paris/Berlin: 20 Years of Underground Techno, mapped the pulse of Western subcultures. But with Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, she pivots eastward—and upward in ambition—taking on a movement that defies categorization, one born from atomic fire and cultural fracture.

The film’s premise is deceptively straightforward: a chronicle of the 1960s and ’70s Japanese underground arts, focusing on photography, graphic design, and performance. But the execution is kaleidoscopic. Ravalec’s camera dances with ghosts—some literal, some metaphorical—through reels of seldom-seen footage, razor-sharp interviews with survivors, and a torrent of surreal images that electrify the screen. You don’t watch this film. You weather it.

Yukio Mishima's A Life in Four Chapters

The Radiant Wound

Japan in the 1960s was still metabolizing trauma at a cellular level. The nuclear cataclysm of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the humiliations of occupation, and the psychic dislocation of rapid Westernization had created a society of contradictions—repressed yet explosive, ashamed yet unrepentant. Ravalec opens with this historical context, not as backdrop but as root system. Out of these contradictions sprouted a countercultural bloom unlike anything the world had seen: Butoh dance, the grotesque theatre of the Angura troupes, the erotic rawness of underground photography, and the feral brilliance of graphic design that mixed Buddhist iconography with B-29 bombers and American porn stars.

“Fear was in our milk,” says one interviewee, an aging avant-gardist reflecting on growing up in firebombed Tokyo. That fear became fuel. The film presents this movement as not merely artistic but existential—an attempt to exorcise, or at least externalize, a haunted collective psyche.

You will find out more about Yukio Mishima, a complex multidisciplinary artist who committed Seppuku 

A Cast of Unruly Visionaries

The ensemble of voices that Ravalec assembles is staggering. Chief among them is photographer Daido Moriyama, whose grainy, blurry, provocatively “failed” images became synonymous with the are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) style. His work, Ravalec suggests, is not documentary but divination—a way to see into the “slits” of daily life and glimpse a parallel Japan, warped by trauma and desire.

Equally riveting are segments on Eikoh Hosoe, who famously collaborated with writer and nationalist icon Yukio Mishima in the homoerotic photo series Killed by Roses; and Nobuyoshi Araki, whose bound female subjects—photographed with unsettling tenderness—force a reevaluation of Western assumptions about erotica and shame. “In Japan,” a scholar explains, “the rope is not just bondage. It’s story. It’s ritual. It’s inheritance.”

And then there’s Shūji Terayama, the film’s enigmatic godfather figure. A poet, provocateur, filmmaker, and Pied Piper of the outré, Terayama’s infamous slogans—“Throw away your books and run into the streets!”—are shown to be more than rebellious posturing. In footage from his Tenjo Sajiki troupe, we see human bodies treated as canvases, theatres transformed into psychic battlefields, and scripts that read like riddles from a dream. Ravalec’s decision to intercut Terayama’s autobiographical film Pastoral: To Die in the Country with images from his actual life is particularly effective—it feels as though the artist himself is narrating from beyond the grave.

The Language of Disobedience

What unites these disparate figures is not merely a shared timeline or aesthetic, but a language of defiance. The Japanese avant-garde didn’t just reject Western norms—it rejected Japanese ones too, attacking the rigidity of traditional forms with an almost gleeful violence. Butoh, for instance, emerged not as a dance but an anti-dance—writhing bodies covered in ash, eyes rolled back, channeling both ancient ritual and modern alienation. It’s the opposite of ballet: grotesque, slow, and raw. In Ravalec’s hands, Butoh becomes a metaphor for the entire film—beautiful in its ugliness, transcendent in its descent.

Likewise, the underground theatre movement—Angura—mounted productions in tents, in streets, and on trains. Nudity was common, chaos encouraged. One archival clip shows commuters stunned into silence as guerilla performers stage an impromptu act of ritual suicide in a subway car. “We had no time for museums,” an actor recalls. “The city was our canvas.”

The documentary makes clear that this movement was ephemeral by design. Most of its major figures are now dead. Others, like Carmen Maki or the members of the anarchic free-jazz group Shibusa Shirazu, continue to perform—living relics of a vanished world. But the physical spaces that housed this rebellion—Lady Jane café, the Golden Gai bars, backstreet galleries—are either gone or gentrified into simulacra of themselves. TikTok tourists now flood lanes once stalked by artistic revolutionaries.

A  photo by Nobuyoshi Araki 

The Ghost in the Image

Still, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers refuses nostalgia. This is not a requiem but a reanimation. The film’s relentless visuality—poster art by Tadanori Yokoo, the surreal photobooks of Kikuji Kawada (The Map), Ishiuchi Miyako’s raw documentation of U.S. military bases—is so intense it borders on psychedelic. Ravalec avoids the trap of letting the Western voice dominate; her narration is spare, her tone reverent but never appropriative. She gives space to Japanese voices, particularly women, to contextualize their experience in a way that resists fetish and simplification.

That resistance is perhaps the film’s most admirable quality. Ravalec understands that to see Japanese art through a Western lens is to miss its essence entirely. Instead, she creates a kind of cinematic noh mask—opaque at times, mysterious, but alive with significance. You feel the temperature of the culture shift. You hear the unsaid. You see the ghost in the image.

A Necessary Resurrection

Can such a moment ever happen again? The film doesn’t pretend it can. That particular confluence of trauma, rupture, rebellion, and artistic hunger was unique and unrepeatable. But by resurrecting it with such care, intensity, and vision, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers becomes more than a film—it becomes a warning, a reminder, and, in its best moments, a work of avant-garde art itself.

Whether you’re an artist, a student of history, or simply someone attuned to the seismic shifts of human expression, this is essential viewing. Go to the theater. Sit in the dark. Let it burn into you.

Because as Terayama might say: throw away your streaming algorithm—and run into the fire.

You have time to see the movie at Cinémathèque Québécoise until July 31, 2025 INFOS

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

FANTASIA 2025 • Alberto Sciamma 's CIELO

FANTASIA

CIELO

 

In Cielo, director Alberto Sciamma delivers not just a film but an act of cinematic grace — a testament to the spiritual and emotional capacities of storytelling that rarely arrives in such raw, transcendent form. At once visually sumptuous, narratively unpredictable, and emotionally revelatory, Cielo is a Bolivian-set tale that fuses magical realism with the bruising truths of human suffering and hope, in the tradition of the best South American literature. You don’t watch this movie so much as you are drawn into its spell, as if by celestial gravity.

At the center of this beguiling vision is Santa — not a saint, not yet — a young girl portrayed with astonishing sincerity by newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda. She lives high in the Bolivian Altiplano, a place of impossible beauty: jagged peaks, glacial lakes like mirrors to the divine, clouds like lost ships sailing across the sky. Santa’s world, however, is anything but heavenly. She’s caught between her gentle, warm mother Paz (Carla Arana) and her brutal, liquor-soaked father (Juan Carlos Aduviri), whose violence simmers beneath every interaction like a stormcloud behind a mountain.

On the left:  John Dunton-Downer: on the right: Alberto Sciamma who were present for the screening and answer questions from the audience. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

One day, Santa decides she must take her mother to Heaven. Not symbolically. Literally. And so begins a journey through landscapes as strange and sacred as the human heart.

What Cielo offers in narrative is less a plotted arc than a migration of spirit. It shares the bones of a fairy tale — a girl on a quest, a cruel father, miraculous helpers — but it resists the saccharine polish of modern fables. This is magical realism in the oldest, truest sense: the impossible revealed not as escapism, but as a way of telling the emotional truth more clearly than realism alone ever could.

From its first unsettling image — Santa calmly catching and swallowing a live fish — we are alerted that logic will not be our guide through this film. That fish, like so many recurring symbols in Cielo, reappears throughout the journey: sometimes alive, sometimes dead, sometimes regurgitated whole. It becomes talisman, companion, question mark. Santa speaks to it. Others dream of it. It may be a soul, or faith, or a memory — or it may simply be a fish. Cielo never over-explains. It invites belief rather than demands understanding.

Along her journey, Santa encounters figures that feel lifted from dream or parable: a grieving policeman with a tender secret behind his macho mustache (Fernando Arze Echalar), a skeptical priest (Luis Bredow) whose cynicism cracks open when confronted with possibility, and a troupe of female Cholita wrestlers who briefly become her guardians. These characters are not mere color or comic relief; they are transformed by Santa’s conviction, as if her very presence evokes something holy in the brokenness of others. One wonders if she is a prophet, a saint, or merely a child who refuses to stop believing.

Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda greeting us from Bolivia. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

Sciamma’s direction here is nothing short of audacious. Cielo dances across genres — part road movie, part fantasy, part spiritual drama, part social critique — yet always anchored by emotional truth. Just when you settle into one rhythm, the film slides into another: a moment of gutting violence follows a vision of grace; surreal comedy bubbles beneath grief. The tonal tightrope Sciamma walks is narrow and high, but he never stumbles.

He’s aided immeasurably by cinematographer Alex Metcalfe, whose lens finds grandeur in both the vast and the intimate. The high Andean terrain is shot with reverence, light catching on ice, shadows painting mountain curves. Yet equally stunning are the scenes of Santa and her mother, framed in tight, glowing compositions that transform simple acts — bathing, cooking, braiding hair — into rituals of love and endurance. Their clothes, in vivid reds and blues against the blue sky, seem almost otherworldly, reminding us that color, too, is language.

The comparison to filmmakers like Jean-Claude Lauzon (Léolo) or André Forcier is apt — there’s a similarly defiant surrealism here, a refusal to bow to realism as the only form of truth. But Cielo feels entirely its own creation, drawing on Bolivian myth, Catholic iconography, and Indigenous cosmology with a light but reverent touch. It understands that belief is not a weakness, but a way through suffering.

That suffering is never sanitized. Like the oldest fairy tales — the ones before Disney got to them — Cielo acknowledges that magic doesn’t erase pain. If anything, it heightens it. Miracles come at a cost. People die. Love fails. But even amid this, wonder persists. A dead condor flies again. A wound closes without explanation. A child keeps walking toward Heaven, fish in hand, faith intact.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about Cielo is how it makes the viewer feel these things not as metaphors, but as experiences. It does not tell you what to think. It gives you images and emotion, and trusts you to meet it halfway. It moves you to tears — and you may not even know why. The effect is cumulative, almost alchemical. You leave the cinema changed, or at least reminded that change is possible.

Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda’s performance deserves special praise. It is rare to see a child actor carry such emotional weight without ever seeming coached or precious. She is not precocious, not “cute,” but elemental — her gaze unflinching, her voice quiet but sure. She believes in Heaven, and by the end, somehow, so do we.

Is there a Heaven in this film? Does Santa arrive? Sciamma withholds easy answers. What matters is the journey, and what is discovered along the way: courage, grace, forgiveness, beauty. Whether or not she finds Heaven, she brings a little of it with her. And that, ultimately, is the miracle of Cielo.

At the Fantasia International Film Festival, where genre often reigns supreme, Cielo feels like a quiet revolution. It doesn’t scream. It whispers, and then, somehow, it sings. For those willing to surrender to its rhythm, its mysteries, its fish and flying birds, its blood and starlight — Cielo offers a cinema of the soul.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

FANTASIA 2025 • The Well Directed by Hubert Davis

 FANTASIA

“The Well”  Hubert Davis, a Riveting Eco-Thriller Evokes Our Dire Future With Poetic Intensity

In The Well, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Davis brings his deeply attuned documentarian eye to narrative cinema, crafting a dystopian vision as harrowing as it is heartbreakingly real. Departing from the supernatural tropes that populate most post-apocalyptic thrillers, Davis roots his first feature film in a terror far closer to home: environmental collapse. Water, the primordial substance that has birthed and sustained civilizations, becomes a rare currency in this tale of survival and moral erosion.

Set in a dense, sun-streaked forest rendered both sanctuary and prison by cinematographer Catherine Lutes, The Well tells the story of the Devine family. Paul (Arnold Pinnock) and Elisha (Joanne Boland) live in hiding with their daughter Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon, luminous with resolve and naïveté), guarding their freshwater supply as the world beyond descends into chaos. Their uneasy peace shatters when Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo) stumbles injured into their clearing. Sarah, yearning for connection in her isolation, is drawn to him despite her parents’ fear of contagion and infiltration.

When their well fails, Sarah defies her parents and follows Jamie to his compound, meeting its enigmatic matriarch, Gabriel (the formidable Sheila McCarthy), who dispenses cryptic parables that veil desperate motives. Davis orchestrates these encounters with unflinching precision, revealing every flaw in human character – greed, fear, tribalism – as instinctual responses to scarcity. The forest, dense with shadows and uneasy rustlings, becomes a moral terrain as treacherous as it is beautiful.

Davis’s deftness with tension echoes his documentary mastery in Black Ice, but here he widens his lens to narrative grandeur. Working alongside executive producers Clement Virgo and Damon D’Oliveira, he constructs a world frighteningly proximate to our own, where ecological collapse forces us to re-examine not only our survival skills but the very structures of empathy and community.

“The Well” benefits from genre stalwarts including Noah Lamanna (The Last of Us) and Natasha Mumba (The Handmaid’s Tale), but it is Pierre-Dixon and McCarthy’s scenes together that sear the screen. Their interplay – innocence meeting cunning, hope clashing with pragmatism – distills the film’s unspoken question: in an unravelling world, who deserves salvation?

The film’s score hums with dread while refusing melodrama, and Davis’s script is refreshingly free of sanctimony. His apocalypse is not an excuse for spectacle; it is a warning, an elegy, and an indictment. As Davis has said, The Well is born from his own fears as a father, grappling with the chaos his children will inherit. The film’s final moments – spare, haunting, unresolvable – leave the viewer with a pulsing ache. It demands we ask what we will sacrifice to protect those we love, and whether that very impulse might doom us all.

Combining Afrofuturism with ecological realism, The Well is a rare cinematic achievement: it conjures a terrifying tomorrow to illuminate the moral failures of today. Hubert Davis has not merely arrived as a narrative filmmaker; he has announced himself with a clarion call we can ill afford to ignore.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

FANTASIA 2025 • Mamoru Oshii 's "Angel's Egg"• August 02 @FantasiaFest

FANTASIA

Angel’s Egg unfolds like a forgotten myth—half-remembered, half-invented, and entirely sacred.

Can you write about a film that defies language, that slips through the cracks of narrative like water seeping into ancient stone? Angel’s Egg, Mamoru Oshii’s cryptic 1985 masterpiece, is less a movie than a whispered dream—one so fragile and deliberate that to speak of it feels like risking its collapse. And yet, talk about it we must, because Angel’s Egg is an experience that demands introspection, invites discomfort, and rewards patience with a kind of revelation that doesn’t explain, but lingers.

At a spare seventy-one minutes, Angel’s Egg stretches time like a psalm spoken underwater. It is unyielding in its refusal to clarify itself. For twenty minutes, silence dominates. There are two characters—a young girl with the hair of an old soul, who guards a large white egg like it contains the last spark of hope in a godless world, and a nameless boy bearing a cross-shaped weapon who may be savior, sinner, or both. Their exchanges are minimal, abstract—almost biblical. They move through a world where Gothic cathedrals collapse into each other and fossilized giants rot beneath the earth, a place where fish shadows swim across walls but the sea is gone. It's a place forsaken by both man and God.

Visually, Angel’s Egg is an abyssal marvel. Yoshitaka Amano’s art direction turns every frame into a cryptic fresco: vast, darkened ruins stretch beyond comprehension, mechanical suns groan in the sky, and time itself seems to be decaying. The imagery evokes Bosch, Giger, and Gothic horror, yet is filtered through a uniquely Japanese sensibility. The animation is slow, reverent—obsessively so—and it dares you to wait, to stare, to meditate.

Is there a plot? Perhaps. A parable is told midway through—about Noah, about a dove that never returns—and it becomes the film’s quiet thesis. Faith in the absence of proof. Hope without reward. Belief in a dying world. The egg becomes both symbol and cipher—childlike faith cradled in trembling hands, something tender and unknowable. Is it worth protecting? Is it even real? Oshii, who began this project in the wake of a personal loss of religious faith, offers no answer.

The final image of Angel’s Egg—its elusive punchline—is a haunting punctuation mark that casts retroactive meaning over all that preceded it. But whether that meaning is despair or transcendence depends entirely on the viewer. Oshii does not comfort. He confronts.

And yet for all its cerebral weight, Angel’s Egg is most powerful as a mood. Its soundscape—minimal, eerie, funereal—melds with the visuals to create an atmosphere that feels thick enough to drown in. It’s less about understanding than surrender. You don’t watch Angel’s Egg; you absorb it. Or perhaps it absorbs you.

It is, undeniably, pretentious. It is also breathtaking.

For fans of games like Bloodborne, which share its obsession with decay, mystery, and the sacred unknowable, Angel’s Egg will feel like a spiritual predecessor. For others, it will be alienating, even infuriating.

But for the right viewer—the willing one—Angel’s Egg is nothing short of a dark prayer carved in celluloid. Whether or not you believe in what it’s praying to, it’s impossible to look away. I belong to this last group.

ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう

" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

FANTASIA 2025 • Ken’ichirô Akimoto 's "All You Need Is Kill"• August 01 @FantasiaFest

FANTASIA

 All You Need Is Kill — A Visually Stunning, Emotionally Charged Reinvention of a Sci-Fi Classic

Premiering at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, All You Need Is Kill marks a bold new evolution in the life cycle of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s time-loop tale. Previously adapted as a manga and then Hollywood’s Edge of Tomorrow, this fourth iteration—helmed by debut director Ken’ichirô Akimoto and animated by Studio 4°C—leans into the psychological and emotional depth of its characters rather than epic-scale warfare. The result is a visually arresting, narratively intimate sci-fi film that redefines what it means to "live, die, repeat."

Set in a post-COVID world, the film trades military barracks and alien battlefields for a quieter apocalypse: a massive alien plant known as Darol has rooted itself on Earth, disrupting life through electromagnetic surges. But one year later, humanity has largely learned to coexist with it—until a single day changes everything. Rita, a quiet researcher with a haunted past, is killed during a sudden attack, only to wake up and relive the same day again. And again. And again.

What makes this adaptation stand out is its emotional core. Unlike previous versions centered on soldier archetypes, Akimoto’s All You Need Is Kill is a character study wearing a sci-fi exosuit. Rita—once a side character in earlier versions—is now the heart of the story. Her time loop becomes less about mastering combat and more about facing internal grief and loneliness. The loop becomes a metaphor for psychological stagnation, and her evolution is one of the most heartfelt in recent anime cinema.

The film is an aesthetic triumph, with Studio 4°C’s cell-shaded animation style bringing a kaleidoscope of color and energy to even the bleakest moments. POV shots during combat scenes feel lifted from first-person video games, while quiet, recurring moments—like Rita waking up in the cafeteria as screams echo in the background—establish a rhythm of existential dread. The designs of the mechanical suits are particularly unique, evoking a Digimon-esque fluidity and giving the characters an exaggerated yet agile presence on screen.

Action sequences are kinetic and inventive, embracing the “roguelike” nature of the source material. As Rita memorizes enemy movements and sharpens her skills, the film channels the repetition and reward systems of video games—but without losing its narrative soul. When she finally meets Kenji, a fellow looper, their dynamic adds new layers to the narrative, keeping the focus refreshingly tight on individual stakes.

However, the film falters in its third act. The climax arrives too abruptly, undermining the emotional buildup and sidelining Rita at the very moment when her arc should reach its peak. The tonal shift and rushed resolution leave an otherwise meticulously crafted experience feeling truncated.

Still, this misstep doesn’t overshadow what Akimoto achieves in his debut. All You Need Is Kill is a rare blend of cerebral science fiction and heartfelt storytelling. It reimagines a familiar narrative through a lens of healing and personal growth, proving that repetition—when done right—can still yield something beautifully new. 

A haunting, gorgeously animated sci-fi gem that finds humanity in the heart of a time loop.

ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう

" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox