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A surprisingly cheerful dinosaur sock puppet explaining how human bodies become bird food is definitely one way to make sure people pay attention. BIRDCALL begins like a children’s educational program produced by a government that has already accepted the end of life as we know it, using the presentation and friendly instructions to describe an avian-spread disease with horrifying consequences. The contrast is funny for a moment, right before the implications settle in.

Eight years into their relationship, Alex and Joey seem to be living entirely different versions of the same life. He sees a romantic camping trip and the perfect place to propose. She sees another reminder of how little he understands her. A SAFE DISTANCE begins inside the thought of that disconnect, then strips away everything and leaves Alex to decide whether the life waiting back home is one she wants to return to.

Deep within the recesses of her mind, fragments of Miki’s memories linger. They are abstract and confusing, but they haunt her days and nights. When a seemingly impossible wolf attack occurs, Miki is forced to confront these memories and seek her truth.

“Opportunity begets opportunity.” The wise words fall out of Will’s mouth in a rare moment of lucidity. He, along with his friends Caro and Felipe, have ventured to a remote vacation home to seek that opportunity they feel they so desperately deserve. Waiting for them there is their estranged collaborator, Sam, who is a little preoccupied.

An evil has awakened in Wingabar Forest, and you are there to witness it firsthand. No one is safe from what comes in the night. Myanmar’s first ever found footage horror film, The Last Footage, had its world premiere at the 30th Fantasia International Film Festival on July 27, 2026.

THE GLORIOUS DEAD begins where belief stops being abstract and becomes anatomy. Blood pours from the taps, the earth refuses to keep its dead imprisoned, and creatures move through the woods as though generations of sermons, resentments, and fantasies of punishment have finally learned how to walk. This isn’t simply Hell arriving on earth in small-town America. It’s small-town America discovering that Hell has been built from its own philosophies, its own divisions, and its own certainty about who deserves to suffer.

Before I start this, take your expectations and toss them out the window, because anything you are thinking about what this film will be, you’re already wrong! Paris introduces herself by showing off the clutter inside her apartment, including a tribute to the musicians she worships. The tour establishes almost everything I LOVE PARIS needs us to understand. She’s funny, uninhibited, slightly exhausting, completely committed to her own mythology, unhinged, and already performing for an audience before anyone has shown much interest in watching.

Family holidays already come with ghosts; some come in the form of memories, some in the form of grudges, and some are just relatives who never really stopped telling everyone else how to live. UNHOLY NIGHT takes that idea and gives it teeth, turning an Italian Christmas Eve celebration into a blood-soaked reunion where the dead don’t just haunt the room; they come back with a grudge to solve.

Some movies treat reality like a wall. SOUR MINNOWS treats it more like bad drywall in a rental apartment, thin enough that something might already be breaking through from the other side. Harrison Atkins’ sophomore feature turns Los Angeles, movie obsession, roommates, and low-grade personal panic into an absurdist breakdown that keeps asking a question. What happens when the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen stops and notices you?

Every time the screenwriter presses a key, somebody else reaches over to rewrite the page. The producer wants more violence, the investors want deeper roles, the cast wants screen time, and artistic integrity has become the only part of the production nobody can afford. Amanbek Azhymat turns that battle into BACKSTAGE MADNESS, a Kyrgyz comedy that begins with a frustrated writer and gradually mutates into the ungovernable movie forming inside his head. Even after watching this, I still don’t know what to think.

HOME BODIES starts with an uneasy idea and lets it sit there, humming in the walls, growing roots from the depths. The home in Casey Walker’s surreal sci-fi film isn’t just a shelter. It’s a parent, a prison, a teacher, an entertainer, a provider, and a liar all in one. Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho) have food, routine, and rules, which might sound like care, if not for the fact that every part of their existence feels designed by someone who understands childhood only as a system to be managed.

In NO REST FOR THE WICKED, the sea feels like a witness, a threat, a grave, and a promise all at once. That matters in a story where love has nowhere safe to go, where desire has to hide under weather, labor, prayer, and silence. Kasper Kalle’s Gothic vampire drama understands that repression doesn’t need to declare itself to become terrifying. Sometimes it’s in the space between two men standing too close. Sometimes it’s in the village watching. Sometimes it’s in the knowledge that the dead may have more freedom than the living.

Seth A. Smith doesn’t treat poverty like background noise in PERMANENT DAMAGE. He treats it like a bad smell in the walls, the kind everyone pretends they can live with until the whole building starts turning against them. The film is part crime story, part romance, part landlord-from-hell comedy, and part surreal working-class nightmare, but the thing holding it together is simpler than any genre label. People are tired, broke, cornered, and one bad choice away from something they can’t take back.

ATTACK ON PARADISE has a relatively simple focus, with a building, a mother, a son, a gang problem, a police raid, and enough bodies in motion to make every stairwell feel like a bad decision. Bob Colaers’ action thriller takes one of the oldest genre delights, a trapped hero fighting through hostile territory. It drops it into an Antwerp apartment complex that has become less a home than a pressure cooker. There’s a familiarity here, but the film makes this story its own.

What are some basic expectations you have when going to watch a movie? The screen is supposed to be self-contained, right? You can be part of the experience, but you’re never going to be in the experience. YOU ARE THE FILM turns that distance into a doorway, a warning system, and eventually a rather funny argument over who gets to control life once someone else can see its next scene.

OUR EFFED UP WORLD has the nerve to look at an alien invasion and ask whether the end of everything might arrive at an inconvenient emotional time. That’s funnier than it sounds, sadder than expected, and exactly the kind of contradiction Alice Maio Mackay chases in their productions. The movie has monsters from beyond the stars, goofy genre ethics, bursts of attitude, and a title that mirrors the world we live in, all too well! Underneath all of that, it’s really about grief making the world feel optional.

Some horror films present themselves with blood, shadows, or something waiting in the corner of the frame. GODHEAD takes a more vexatious route, in the best and most uncomfortable sense. It gets under the skin through certainty. Not true. Not faith. Certainty. The kind that makes people stare a little too long, speak with a little too much confidence, and turn ordinary rooms into places where logic starts slipping loose from the walls.

Harrison Houde’s feature directorial debut takes a father-son story, drags it through the harm of addiction, and refuses to file down the uncomfortable parts into something easier to digest. It’s a dark comedy, sure, but that only gets you halfway there. This is also a movie about responsibility, denial, panic, hope, and the kind of love that keeps working long after reason has left the room.

The depths of horror understand that the past doesn’t stay buried just because a family stops talking about it. Sometimes it waits in a room nobody enters. Sometimes it shapes the way people love, fight, collapse, and survive. In ANCESTRAL BEASTS, that inheritance doesn’t remain abstract. It crawls into the open.

There’s giant dramatic fallout or grand romantic gesture in WAVERLY—just two people trying to hold on to each other as the world quietly pushes them apart. Clocking in at just 17 minutes, this short drama lands a surprisingly potent emotional punch, grounded in subtle performances and a setting that feels lived-in rather than staged. Co-directed by Marie-Pier Diamond and Gilles Plouffe, it’s the kind of story that doesn’t ask for your attention—it earns it. It’s rare to see a short that doesn’t try to extend beyond its framing. This is exactly what it sets out to be and knows that from the first frame.

TOUCH ME doesn’t care if you’re ready for the journey ahead. It just grabs hold and drags you into a neon-soaked spiral of grief, desire, and seduction, where logic is fluid and feelings are uncomfortable, and dare I say, sticky—often literally. For writer-director Addison Heimann, last seen at Fantasia with his 2022 breakout HYPOCHONDRIAC, this is a full-blown eruption of genre chaos that somehow still circles back to something deeply personal.

What happens when rebellion melts into horror and rage gets mixed into something unnervingly sweet? SUGAR ROT explodes onto the screen with all the subtlety of a Molotov cocktail in a candy store. This is body horror with purpose, satire soaked in syrup and spiked with venom — a film that dares to look obscene, feel grotesque, and shout back at every force trying to control the female body.

THE SCHOOL DUEL demands your attention, shakes it, and leaves it wrecked. Set in a twisted, secessionist Florida where gun control is outlawed and school shootings have metastasized into a normalized part of adolescence (okay, so maybe not too far from reality), Todd Wiseman Jr.’s debut feature isn’t science fiction so much as it is prophecy. It takes the notion of "what if things keep going this way" and strips it of metaphor, replacing it with state-sponsored bloodsport—and still, somehow, it doesn’t feel that far-fetched.

There’s something potent about watching a person prepare to say goodbye—not to someone, but to something that has shaped their identity for decades. In BARBIE BOOMER, that "something" is a collection of dolls. But Marc Joly-Corcoran’s documentary makes it clear early on: these aren’t just toys. They’re time capsules, symbols of imagination, and witnesses to an entire life. Through the lens of his cousin, Sylvie Longpré, Joly-Corcoran captures a deeply personal and surprisingly universal story about memory, loss, and the unspoken emotions that connect us with the things we love.