Fantasia Roundup! Kiltro! Mirage Man!

So, here’s the thing. While I don’t need to be back at the paying gig until Wednesday the lady friend had to report in to work today, getting up bright and early at six AM to do so, so as much as it pained us to do so the plan was to catch the noon screening of Kiltro then hop in the car like good little worker drones and do the six hour drive back home to Toronto so that she could be conscious and functional in the morning at work. But hey ... Kiltro was so much fun to watch with a crowd and the chance to catch up with producer Derek Rundell—who we spent a great deal of time with in Cannes, he’s one of the good guys—so enticing that we opted to stick around for the second Zaror offering after which I’d heavily caffeinate myself and drive through the night while she slept in the car. Good choice.

Kiltro played int eh big room to a good sized crowd obviously looking to be impressed and when Zaror threw his first blazing-fast double kick you could tell all the martial arts fans in the room were hooked. Kiltro is a very ambitious film for a first offering, an epic sized stew of characters and back stories all of which need their own attention but it balances things out well and played very strong to the room, always a good feeling as a programmer. The Q&A was a lively one and Rundell gave me the go ahead to spill a possible sequel idea that was floated during Cannes. It’s all hugely preliminary, of course, and may very well never happen, but the leading idea at the moment is to send the heel-bladed hero to an actual ghost town in the mountains of northern Chile and pit him against a horde of bloodthirsty zombies. Nice.

Following the screening it was the aforementioned catch-up time, the quartet of Derek, myself, the lady friend, and Derek’s wife Megan heading down to the old part of the city, where we sat in the rooftop restaurant of a 125 year old hotel sipping our beverages while watching the river traffic on the St. Lawrence. Should you ever make the trip to Montreal—and you should—make a point of hitting the Old City, it’s a different world down there.

And then Mirage Man, so freshly out of post that the producer himself had never seen it on the big screen, and never anywhere with the final audio mix. If it was a print, I’d say it was still dripping but it’s on HD and I don’t know of any digital equivalent. Particularly gratifying here was to see how many people who had taken a chance on Kiltro earlier in the day had changed their evening plans to catch this one and they were not disappointed. A much more raw affair with a crackling pace, Mirage Man delivers some stunning martial arts goods with a surprising sense of tongue in cheek humor that, in the early going particularly, kept the audience laughing when not asking each other if they’d just seen what they thought they’d seen Zaror do. While Kiltro aims epic, Mirage Man aims for raw grit and both sent the audience home happy.

And now I’m home. And tired. Someone send food.