Radical Spirits

Humanity’s roots run deep, countless millennia deep, into the soil of our material world, and that of the spirits. In genre cinema, the ideas and images of older ways of knowing are all too frequently harbingers of dread and danger. Fantasia’s short-film showcase RADICAL SPIRITS proposes an inversion of that. From animated quasi-documentary to thrilling dark fantasy, magic-realist family drama to psychedelic ritual, RADICAL SPIRITS gathers short films that tap into folk religion, Indigenous beliefs, and ancestral ways. They bear gifts – the wisdom to coexist honourably with nature, the strength and grace to counter the ills of colonialism and patriarchy, and sometimes simply a measure of solace, too easily missed in these modern times.