Montreal’s genre film-focused Fantasia International Film Festival is highlighting debut features from Canadian filmmakers in early looks at its 2025 lineup.

While the slate will be fully revealed in July, three films were announced Thursday (June 5) as part of the festival’s Septentrion Shadows section, reserved for Canadian films and coproductions.

Infinity Buffet (pictured), from Edmonton-based comedian Simon Glassman, tells the increasingly sinister story of two restaurants battling for supremacy through low-budget TV ads. The comedy is produced by Glassman along with Michael Peterson (What’s Left of Us) for his Calgary-based banner Peterson Polaris Corp.

Writer-director Ava Maria Safai explores the latent horror in the high school experience with Foreigner. The Vancouver-shot debut feature is produced by Safai and Nicco Graham for the Harlequin Theatre Society, Safai’s Saffron Blonde Productions and Nic Altobelli’s Naltobel Productions. Foreigner stars Rose Dehgan as an Iranian immigrant whose desperation to fit into her new school attracts a demonic force. It was supported by Telefilm Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Creative BC, Vancouver Foundation and the BC Arts Council, Safai told Playback Daily.

Lucid (Sublunar Films) initially came to Fantasia in 2022 as part of the Frontierés Market Shorts to Features Lab. Since then, directors and producers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall have evolved it into a feature-length project. Joined by producer Emanuel Foucault, Lucid follows an art student who begins using the eponymous candy elixir to overcome creative blocks, only to tap into something much darker. It stars Caitlin Acken Taylor and Georgia Acken.

Fantasia also highlights films from its home province through Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québécois section, opening with the North American premiere of Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s La mort n’existe pas (Death Does Not Exist; Embuscade Films, Miyu Productions).

Old Guys in Bed (Old Guys Productions), the directorial feature debut from actor Jean-Pierre Bergeron (The Last Chapter) is set for a world premiere in this section. The film is written and directed by Bergeron and stars Duff MacDonald and Paul James Saunders as two older men that meet on a dating website, unfamiliar with the new ways of forming romantic relationships.

The Quebecois program also includes the world premiere of André Forcier (Coteau rouge) and Jean-Marc E. Roy (Des histoires inventées)’s Ville Jacques-Carton (Cardboard City; Papier-Brique). The film, which merges reality with fiction, follows a poet refusing to sell his house to a “predatory, if not slightly unhinged, real estate developer,” and weaves in voices and stories from the defunct working class Montreal municipality Ville Jacques-Cartier.

The Septentrion Shadows section announced three more world premieres earlier in May, including Shudder’s Influencers (Jackrabbit Media) from Canadian director Kurtis David Harder and Hubert Davis’ (Black Ice) narrative feature debut The Well (Aiken Heart Films).

May’s announcement spotlighted the world premiere of the first feature from visual effects artist Jody Wilson (Indigo) in The Bearded Girl (Goodbye Productions, Anamorphic Media). The film, written and directed by Wilson, stars Anwen O’Driscoll and Jessica Paré and follows a bearded girl, tired of her sheltered carnival life.

Fantasia is presenting the 2025 Canadian Trailblazer Award to George Mihalka. The Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker is known for films such as the 1981 slasher My Bloody Valentine and received a Best Director Genie Award nomination for his 1993 comedy La Florida. Mihalka will also be conducting a master class at the festival, presented by the Directors Guild of Canada.

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 16 to Aug. 3. Its official opening film is Ari Aster’s Eddington, which made its world premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival.

Image courtesy of the Fantasia International Film Festival