The Fantasia International Film Festival 30th edition brings us an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and events running from July 16 through August 2, 2026 across Montreal.
In the opening minutes of the 30th edition, Fantasia will award a Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award to the extraordinary Danish director, screenwriter, and producer Nicolas Winding Refn. A singular storytelling poet, gifted stylist, and boundary-pushing provocateur, Refn has been a transformative force in world cinema since bursting out of Copenhagen with the instant-classic crime drama PUSHER (1996), which simultaneously launched the careers of Mads Mikkelsen and Zlatko Buric.
Over the 30 years that followed, he’s blessed us with such dark treasures as BLEEDER (1999), FEAR X (2003), PUSHER 2 (2004), PUSHER 3 (2005), BRONSON (2008), VALHALLA RISING (2009), DRIVE (2011), ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013), THE NEON DEMON (2016), the Amazon series Too Old To Die Young (2019) and Netflix’s Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), and now, the immaculate HER PRIVATE HELL (2026), which celebrates its Canadian Premiere as the Opening Film of this years festival.
Off-set, Refn has used his visibility throughout his career to champion underappreciated filmmakers whose work he admires, to spearhead intensive restorations, and to curate retrospectives to re-contextualise neglected works. He’s created a coffee-table book on exploitation poster art and even founded NWR – a bespoke streaming home for the multitudes of restorations he and his team initiate, which he runs as a living digital museum.
The Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award this year will go to Takashi Shimizu. Born in 1972 in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, Takashi Shimizu studied theatre at university before quickly establishing himself as a master of horror with the JU-ON saga, which began as a direct-to-video production in which he served as the creator, screenwriter, and director.
His first theatrical feature, JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2002), became an instant classic of Japanese horror, influencing both regional and worldwide cinema thanks to its explosive success at the box office and on the festival circuit (including a screening at Fantasia 2003). Following this global triumph, Shimizu directed its first two American remakes in 2004 and 2006, becoming the first Japanese filmmaker to top the U.S. box office. In addition to horror gems like MAREBITO (2004), REINCARNATION (2005), and SANA (2023), Shimizu has demonstrated his versatility with the live-action adaptation of the Ghibli children’s classic KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE (2014) and the sci-fi thriller HUMUNCULUS (2021).
He also fosters young talent as an Executive Producer, having helped launch the careers of filmmakers such as Yuta Shimotsu (NEW GROUP, Fantasia 2025) and Eriko Katagiri (WHEN YOU OPEN THE DOOR, Fantasia 2026). Fantasia celebrates his career – while illustrating that he remains a prolific and pertinent director – with the World Premiere of VILLAGE OF EIGHT GRAVESTONES and the North American Premiere of THE MOUTHS.
Bookending the opening film of Nicolas Winding Refn’s HER PRIVATE HELL is the closing night film, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s FREAKS PART II. Following the 2018 sleeper-hit sci-fi indie FREAKS and 2025’s critically acclaimed, record-shattering FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES, the celebrated Canadian filmmakers return to their mutant roots with this hotly anticipated sequel.
Fantasia will also celebrate Apple TV’s chilling adaptation and reimagining of CAPE FEAR with the series finale world premiere. In this stunning TV adaptation, a storm is coming for happily married attorneys Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson) when Max Cady (Javier Bardem), the notorious killer they are responsible for putting behind bars, is let out of prison. Executive producers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg team up with showrunner Nick Antosca, who deftly crafts a singular reinterpretation of the classic thriller, in a format that deliberately allows madness to take hold, depicting the unravelling of the Bowden family.
Once again this year, Fantasia will also celebrate a new generation of groundbreaking genre auteurs with films from Jane Schoenbrun, Louise Weard, and Alice Maio Mackay.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – Fantasia International Film Festival 30th Edition.
Visionary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun will arrive in Montreal fresh off their Cannes premiere, Palm Queer win and SXSW London premiere with the Canadian premiere of TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original movie’s star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.
Louise Weard makes her Fantasia debut with CASTRATION MOVIE CHAPTER iii: A FRAGMENTARY PASSAGE, a two-hour festival-exclusive fragment from CASTRATION MOVIE CHAPTER iii: YEAR OF THE HYAENA. The film stars Avalon Fast as she does everything in her power to stop her partner (Henri Gillespi) from transitioning.
Jane Schoenbrun also produces OUR EFFED UP WORLD from frequent Fantasia festival darling, Alice Maio Mackay. Inspired by alien invasion films and slacker hangout movies, Mackay’s latest is about a group of friends standing up against an extraterrestrial invasion that threatens to swallow the whole world, starring Jess McLeod, Brandon Flynn, and Annapurna Sriram.
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark – Fantasia International Film Festival 30th Edition
While films such as APOCALYPSE NOW, FULL METAL JACKET, and PLATOON hardly glorified the massive military misadventure in Southeast Asia, they offered only the American perspective. Now, award-winning writer/director Bui Thac Chuyen provides a counterpoint with a powerful war film that’s intelligent, empathic, convincing, and intense.
TUNNELS: SUN IN THE DARK follows a band of poorly equipped resistance fighters preparing to defend the vast network of crude tunnels underneath Cu Chi district against the hell that their enemies are on the verge of unleashing. Great pride is evident in the ingenuity and camaraderie of the combatants, but Bui demonstrates wise restraint, avoiding the excesses of propaganda productions. Nevertheless, TUNNELS was an unprecedented box-office smash on its home turf, with clever, claustrophobic camerawork (shot largely in the actual Cu Chi tunnels), a subtle and affecting score, and strong performances by its three leads. TUNNELS is an essential and overdue alternative reflection on a conflict no less relevant after half a century.
For those looking for something lighter, comedy also sits at the heart of Fantasia International Film Festival’s 30th Edition. Fans of cringe comedy will be in heaven with the unique, uncomfortable blast of adult animation, BLAISE, praised by Première Magazine as the funniest film at this year’s Cannes. Imagine a distinctly French take on Scandinavian “comedy of embarrassment” films, or a much drier Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Directed by Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue, based on the former’s cult comic book, BLAISE is the story of the desperate-to-be-loved Sauvage family, voiced by Léa Drucker, Jacques Gamblin, and Timéo. What begins as a hilarious domino effect of social disasters, a comedy of manners and misunderstandings, blossoms into something distinctly more charged. You’ll die of embarrassment for these characters and the absurd, life-altering situations their neuroses land them in, yet BLAISE casts reflections that resonate more profoundly as its non-heroes make direly consequential choices out of a desperate need to feel even vaguely liked. Produced by Alexandre Gavras.
Meanwhile, BEASTS CLUTCHING AT STRAWS offers a hilarious and explosive bag of surprises. A young streamer working at an internet cafe discovers a bag containing 100 million yen and must seize it for his family’s sake. Ebato, a corrupt police officer riddled with debt to a cruel yakuza and his botanical torture partner, is planning a massive fraud scheme. A prostitute beaten by her husband befriends a femme fatale colleague who seems to know the ropes of organised crime. The fates of all these disparate characters will collide in a mind-blowing fireworks display.
BEASTS CLUTCHING AT STRAWS is a captivating neon-noir thriller and a delirious, cynical black comedy featuring several epic, manga-esque sequences. Supported by an exceptional cast led by Ouji Suzuka, the brilliant Hideo Jojo surpasses himself in terms of direction and ideas to make this adaptation of Keisuke Sone’s famous novel, winner of the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize.
Bowels of Hell – Fantasia International Film Festival 30th Edition
Plus, for those who believe they’ve seen everything cinema has to offer, here comes BOWELS OF HELL, unquestionably the grossest film of Fantasia 2026 – and also one of its wildest, most unpredictable, and hilarious. It’s not entirely a scatological humour fest because BOWELS is also a surprisingly touching story about parents and children, and the struggle to focus on the people in your life who matter most. It’s also filled with some of the most disgustingly inventive kills seen in any movie in some time, and it should come as little surprise that even the legendary Bruce LaBruce shows up at one point.
When you gotta go, you gotta go… but in this film’s haunted São Paolo apartment complex, “go” means that your time is most certainly up! Produced by Rodrigo Teixeira, the Oscar-nominated producer of THE WITCH, I’M STILL HERE, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and THE LIGHTHOUSE, BOWELS OF HELL is an unexpectedly layered mix of family drama, social satire, cranked-to-eleven grossout horror, and poop jokes told with energy, wit, and style, coming to the continent after blowing minds and stomachs at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
For those of you seeking out fantasy, science fiction and adventure, why not add ROMIN to your list? Romin (Anthony Dionne) stumbles upon a mysterious object in a Quebec forest. Together with his sister Maya (Rosalie Pépin), his sketchy pal Jeff (Jassen Charron), and his new classmate Booker (James Edward Metayer), Romin heads to a village in the north, following in the footsteps of a missing archaeologist to find out more about the artefact. It turns out that, having touched it, Romin is struck by a curse that will kill him unless he returns it to the cave from whence it came, in the Bahamas. Directed by actors Anthony Dionne and Jassen Charron, ROMIN is an INDIANA JONES-style adventure featuring plenty of suspense and action, including some truly astonishing stunts. Amid the various twists and turns, more serious themes, such as grief, are explored with great tact and care.
Romin – Fantasia International Film Festival 30th Edition
It’s been over a decade since director Casey Walker last visited Fantasia’s hallowed halls. In 2012, his horror/comedy A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE lit up Montreal – and in the years since, he’s produced Canadian landmarks THE VOID and IN A VIOLENT NATURE. Now, for Fantasia’s 30th anniversary, Walker returns with HOME BODIES, a surreal sci-fi thriller built to rattle audiences. Twins Red and Blue (Emma and Ian Ho) exist in isolation, governed by Papa, a voice behind a door dispensing food, shelter, and law. When the androgynous Pal (Ess Hödlmoser) arrives, their world fractures.
Why not celebrate the festive holidays in the middle of July with UNHOLY NIGHT? Family, food and a nonna who won’t die make Christmas Eve a bloody mess for Gino and his family. This tight-knit Italian unit soon finds out that Gino and his ex-girlfriend aren’t the most scandalous things in the family when his dead grandmother comes back to “help” with the festivities. With an ensemble cast that strikes a great balance of horror, heart, and hilarity, the cast includes Marc Bendavid, Shailene Garnett and veteran actor Ron Lea of the Canadian classic, CLEARCUT! Gabriele’s debut feature perfectly captures the chaos of the holidays – as Gino and his family battle an onslaught of undead relatives and lost love – all on Christmas Eve.
And finally, for those looking for short, sharp shocks, laughs and cinematic adventures, there is a treasure trove of short film collections to enjoy from ANIME NO BENTO to COLLECTIVE DELUSIONS and ARE YOU AFRAID OF FANTASIA?
For full programme details and ticket information, visit the Fantasia International Film Festival site. Cinerama coverage starts July 17th.
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