First Japanese titles announced for Fantasia International Film Festival 2011

by Chris MaGee

Each summer a strange phenomena occurs in Canada's major cities. For three weeks in July genre films fans just disappear. They don't frequent their usual rep theatres. They don't visit their favorite indie video stores. What they do instead is leave their hometowns and migrate en masse to Montreal for the annual Fantasia International Film Festival. 2011 is no different, with Fantasia marking their 15th year Festival director Mitch Davis and the fest programmers are bringing together some of the best genre films from across the globe for Canadian audiences, and that of course includes films from Japan.

This past week Fantasia announced the first films in their extensive 2011 line-up and in amongst their usual genre gems are some great Japanese titles. Like what? How about Takashi Miike's "Ninja Kids", Shinji Imaoka's pink film musical "Underwater Love", Shuji Iwai's English-language debut feature "Vampire", as well as the world premiere of "Battlefield Baseball" director Yudai Yamaguchi's new film "Deadball". You can check out the trailer for "Deadball" below... and it looks like Tak Sakaguchi and the usual Sushi Typhoon team are being joined by a couple veterans, namely Mickey Curtis (Fires on the Plain, The Lily Festival) and Renji Ishibashi (Audition, Gozu). Neat!

Keep checking back with Fantasia's official website here for details on their full 2011 line-up. Our thanks goes to Fantasia's and Evokative Films' Stephanie Trepanier for the heads up.