by James Martin

Concordia University is all about oddball cinema this summer. On June 20 and 21, Cinéma du Parc will screen a 90-minute retrospective of short films by François Miron, an experimental filmmaker and instructor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.

Filmgrafix: The Hallucinatory Shorts of François Miron offers a rare opportunity to see the celebrated director’s experimental weirdness on the big screen.

Miron teaches the technical aspects of filmmaking, and his own work displays a virtuosic mastery of the process known as optical printing. A notoriously time-intensive procedure, optical printing is essentially frame-by-frame re-photography using a projector aimed at a camera. The process allows Miron to superimpose animation over live action, to create surreal saturated colours, and to wildly distort and manipulate images. The results are trippy cinematic freakouts perfect for the midnight movie circuit.

Filmgrafix collects his non-narrative short films from 1987 to 1999. Also on the bill is Miron’s first foray into (somewhat) more traditional storytelling, the 20-minute Resolving Power, which was the toast of the 2001 FanTasia film festival.

Speaking of FanTasia, the popular fantasy/action/horror film festival has a new home: Concordia’s Hall Building (Room H-110) and de Sève Cinema. The annual festival skipped last summer because its longtime venue, the Imperial Cinema, was undergoing renovations. The Imperial still isn’t ready, and so FanTasia has decamped for Concordia.

Donato Totaro is thrilled to have the eight-year-old festival back. The part-time Film Studies instructor has covered FanTasia as a critic and journalist, and is a longtime fan. He says FanTasia’s adventurous programming — such as screening Hideo Nakata’s cult horror film The Ring long before the Hollywood remake machine got wind of it — has earned it a stellar international reputation, attracting moviegoers from around the world.

“FanTasia shows so many genre films I never thought I’d see on bootleg black-market video, let alone see them on the big screen. A lot of these films are controversial, or have been banned. Man Behind the Sun [which screened at the 1998 festival] is a good example. It’s a Chinese film about a Japanese concentration camp during the Sino-Japan war; it’s purely an exploitation film, but it raises this important incident which is suppressed in Japanese history books.”

The official FanTasia 2003 lineup was yet to be announced, but Totaro says insider scuttlebutt hints that the undead will be particularly well represented this time around — including the premiere of local writer/director Elza Kephart’s debut feature, Graveyard Alive.

“If you like zombies,” Totaro quipped, “it will be a very good year.”

FanTasia runs from July 17 to August 10. Complete screening information can be found on the official Web site, www.fantasiafest.com, starting June 10.