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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.

“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.

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.

In MESSY LEGENDS, the party never quite ends—it just changes, spirals, and explodes into something far more unhinged. Expanding on their acclaimed 2023 short, co-directors Kelly Kay Hurcomb and James Watts deliver a full-length, chaotic deep dive into Montreal’s nightlife, slacker culture, and the millennial generation’s lingering malaise. What begins as a loose, vibrant love letter to the Plateau’s underground scene turns into something messier, more introspective, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable.

It works, even though it shouldn’t, it really shouldn’t! Simon Glassman’s BUFFET INFINITY doesn’t just bend the rules—it microwaves them on high until they bubble and explode. What begins as a satire of small-town local television quickly spirals into a hallucinatory, absurdist descent into the mind of a community being devoured by its own identity. This is weird cinema at its best: committed, chaotic, and unnervingly hypnotic.

SHRIMP FRIED RICE weaponizes weird into a full-blown, puppet-powered battle royale between crustacean and rodent. In just twelve minutes, Dylan Pun’s wild short manages to cram in more laughs, ingenuity, and full-blown madness than many feature-length comedies even attempt. It’s a culinary chaos warzone where egos boil over, loyalties flip like flapjacks, and the rice isn’t the only thing being fried.

A GRAND MOCKERY is the kind of film that crawls under your skin and refuses to leave quietly. Directed and co-written by Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon, this surreal Australian feature explodes with gritty sincerity, hallucinatory dread, and a uniquely regional sense of decay. Shot entirely on Super 8mm, it’s as if the film stock itself is rotting before your eyes—perfectly mirroring the mental deterioration of its central character, Josie.

HAUNTED MOUNTAINS: THE YELLOW TABOO doesn’t rush to frighten you—it drifts, floats, and occasionally vanishes into its own shadow. It's a film as stubbornly ethereal as the legends it draws from, positioning itself somewhere between experimental cinema, mythological meditation, and slow-burning horror. Rain Wu’s film is not trying to fit a conventional mold, and that’s both its strength and its Achilles’ heel.

There’s a fine line between daring and disorganized, and ANYTHING THAT MOVES spends much of its runtime trying to balance on it. Shot on Super 16mm and drenched in both neon light and bodily fluids, the latest offering from Alex Phillips aims to be provocative, but often ends up tangled in its stylized excess. From the first frame, this is a film that’s designed to challenge your expectations, your comfort zone, and occasionally your patience.

HELLCAT wastes no time pulling you into its world of uncertainty. A woman wakes up in a moving trailer with no idea where she is, how she got there, or why she has a wound on her side. That’s the setup, and the clock starts ticking almost immediately. What follows is a lean, paranoia-fueled thriller that gradually shifts into something more emotionally grounded—and ultimately more unsettling. It’s a strong debut feature from writer-director Brock Bodell, and a showcase for Dakota Gorman, whose performance helps anchor the film as it veers from grittiness to psychological horror.

MOTHER OF FLIES is a return—and a reckoning. With this latest experience, the Adams family doesn't just go back to their roots; they dig them up, twist them, and expose every worm underneath, burying it with rocks. John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser once again write, direct, and star, continuing the familiar filmmaking style that’s defined their work: the family that slays together, stays together. It’s never clearer than now how much that bond shines through on screen. But this time, the stakes feel more personal, the horror more real, and the artistry more purposeful.

Some horror films scream; this one snarls. THE SERPENT’S SKIN might clock in at just over 80 minutes, but it packs in enough fury, vulnerability, and rebellion to fill an entire franchise. Alice Maio Mackay’s sixth feature is her most assured and emotionally volatile work yet (and that’s saying something because she has one hell of a filmography)—a supernatural queer horror tale that wields witchcraft, body horror, and heartbreak with equal urgency. It’s brutal, funny, and unmistakably punk in spirit, refusing to flatten its characters into metaphors or reduce their trauma to exposition.

The pressures of assimilation, especially for immigrant teens, are rarely presented with a story this powerful. FOREIGNER captures a time when low-rise jeans and sitcom reruns ruled pop culture, but reimagines that familiar coming-of-age formula through a supernatural horror lens. Ava Maria Safai’s directorial debut dares to blend pastel-filtered aesthetics with the creeping dread of cultural erasure, delivering a film that’s equal parts satire and psychological nightmare. It does all of this with very little “traditional horror” and with a focus on fear, anger, and judgment.

THE BEARDED GIRL may sound like the setup for something whimsical, but what it delivers instead is a stripped-down, emotionally honest coming-of-age story about the weight of legacy, the longing for normalcy, and the cost of pretending to be something you’re not—even if that something was working just fine for everyone else.