Montreal: Hong Kong’s newest mega-star Lau Ching-Wan is the top bill at the fifth edition of Fantasia, the International Festival of Fantasy, Action and Genre Cinema, which opened at Montreal’s Imperial Cinema July 13 and runs through to July 31.

Lau, hailed as a successor to Hong Kong action stars John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li, has also launched a North American acting career, recently completing filming on the Hong Kong/Canada coprod Lunch with Charles.

At Fantasia, Lau will present two of his latest action movies, Running Out Of Time, directed by Johnnie To, and the schizoid-horror whodunit Victim from genre master Ringo Lam.

Japan is again highlighted at the festival with a slate of trendy female-revenge flicks, including Audition, Ring 0: The Birthday, The Black House, the ultra-strange Uzumaki and the international premiere of Freeze Me, a rape-revenge drama from filmmaker Takashi Ishii, described by festival organizers as ‘the Japanese expert in feminine suffering in filmmaking.’

World premieres include the Canadian sci-fi film Between the Moon and Montevideo from Montreal director/producer Attila Bertalan, the festival’s opening night film; Tim Southam’s Island of the Dead; u.s. director Peter Filardi’s Ricky 6; the de-pixelized Japanese sci-fi porno movie i.k.u. (‘I’m Coming’); and Japanese animation director Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s latest offering, Blood: The Last Vampire.

Lunch with Charles is being distributed in North America by Vancouver-based LS Entertainment, a distributor of Asian features. The film has been licensed in Canada by Citytv, TMN-The Movie Network, Superchannel and Super Ecran.

Festival director Pierre Corbeil says last year’s edition attracted close to 70,000.

This year Fantasia is partnered with Festival Just for Laughs and includes a comedy section called Comedia.*

– www.fantasiafest.com