Fantasia's 30th edition closed with the sequel to the film that helped launch its makers

Fantasia’s 30th edition ran July 16 to August 2 in Montreal, marking the anniversary with, by Cult MTL’s count, roughly 125 features and more than 200 shorts. (Variety, covering the same edition, put the numbers at 119 features and 400 shorts — the two outlets don’t agree on an exact count, which is worth knowing if you go looking for one yourself.)

Nicolas Winding Refn opened it: the festival gave him its Cheval Noir career-achievement award, then he introduced the Canadian premiere of his own “Her Private Hell.” It closed on a homegrown note: the world premiere of “Freaks Part II,” from Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, a sequel to their 2018 feature “Freaks.” Lipovsky told Variety directly that first film’s 2019 Fantasia premiere opened doors for the pair’s career — seven years and a sequel later, the festival that launched “Freaks” got to close on its follow-up.

Between those two bookends, the film worth flagging is Ashlea Wessel’s feature debut, “Junction Row,” which Fantasia audiences were among the first to see. Per Cult MTL, Katharine Isabelle — a name Canadian horror fans have known since “Ginger Snaps” — plays Juno, a woman working to stay clean who walks away from a housing compound on society’s margins. When her beloved Ruby vanishes, Juno goes back, and finds the place has slid into criminal activity and, per Cult MTL, something stranger than just “menacing drug dealers.” Cult MTL describes it as “part action film, part creature feature” — a grounded crime story and a full creature-feature swing in the same debut, not a small ask for a first feature to pull off.

Wessel’s film wasn’t the only Canadian work in the lineup. Per Cult MTL’s preview, local features “Someone’s Daughter” (starring François Arnaud), “La Place” and “The Galactic Ghoul” also screened, and Bruce McDonald (“Pontypool”) and Québécois filmmaker Robert Lepage were among the festival’s special guests this year.

Read together, that’s a first-time Canadian director’s creature feature sharing a program with a career-achievement honouree and a returning homegrown franchise — the kind of company Fantasia has built a three-decade reputation on putting Canadian work into. Whether that placement was a deliberate curatorial statement or simply where the calendar landed this year isn’t something the festival told us; what’s verifiable is the lineup itself.

No distribution deal for “Junction Row” turned up in our reporting as of this writing — it’s the title we’ll be watching for a distribution announcement.