Fantasia marks 30 years as Montreal's gateway to world cinema

When Pierre Corbeil founded the Festival international de films Fantasia in 1996 with friends Martin Sauvageau and André Dubois, he expected about 25,000 people to attend over a month at the cinéma Impérial. Instead, 55,000 showed up—a surprise that told him immediately they had something special.

Back then, Fantasia was exclusively devoted to cinema asiatique, mostly from Hong Kong. Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and John Woo films were still rare in Quebec. "Almost all our projections attracted hundreds of spectators," Corbeil recalls. "We knew from the first year we were holding something."

Three decades later, Fantasia remains one of Canada's most-attended film festivals. The festival has crossed the 80,000-participant mark since 2024 and continues to expand its reach. Its Frontières market—now the largest genre-cinema coproduction market in terms of project reach—has presented at Cannes for years and expanded to Berlin's European Film Market in 2026.

The festival has also evolved beyond its Asian-cinema roots. Quebec filmmaking now plays a central role in programming, with genre cinema increasingly exploring every boundary. Some of the best-received films at Cannes recently have been horror, thriller, and science fiction—a trend that ripples back to Montreal's audience.

Local director Louis Bélanger's new film "125, rue des Malaises," premiering this month, reflects a distinctly Quebec take on an audacious subject: a patriarch choosing medical aid in dying on his own terms, a decision that upends his family when a half-brother appears and chaos ensues. The film was shot using controlled improvisation, giving actors enormous freedom in dialogue and characterization—an experimental approach that gives it what actor Pierre-Luc Funk calls "a saveur particulière," a distinctive flavour audiences will feel.