Theme – Reversing the Gaze

Reclaiming history though Indigenous fantastic cinema.

Imagine 2025’s Myths of the World section, Reversing the Gaze, will look at the way Indigenous filmmakers use Fantastic film to reclaim their own histories and change the narrative.

Following up on this years’ main festival theme, A Tentacular Touch, and its focus on H.P. Lovecraft, Imagine 2025 critically explores Lovecraft’s fear of immigrants, non-Americans and refugees – basically any non-White person threatening the American way of life – in the programme Reversing the Gaze. Lovecraft was of course a product of his time, the Interwar period, but ‘the fear that Lovecraft felt and wrote, is the same fear that continues to guide and shape America itself’, according to Baily Marvel in his thesis American Fears: H.P. Lovecraft and The Paranoid Style.

So what do we see if we flip the script? What happens if we change the gaze from fearing non-White, non-American alien worshippers to the perspective of the colonised, non-White peoples of the Americas and beyond? How do the ‘others’ reversely imagine their demons threatening their way of life, and how do they express these fears through Fantastic cinema? These new voices may not necessarily bend genre conventions, but they do change the story. As Rhianna Patrick, a Torres Strait Islander journalist, wrote in 2020: ‘Indigenous creators are exorcising their demons by reclaiming the narrative and making horror on their own terms’.

Reversing the Gaze explores these questions through a selection of new and older Fantastic titles and specials.

Titles and specials in the programme

• Mārama – Taratoa Stappard (Māori/English), New Zealand, 2025
• Uiksaringitara / Wrong Husband Zacharias Kunuk (Inuk), Canada, 2025
• Night Raiders – Danis Goulet (Cree/Métis), Canada, 2021
• Seeds – Kaniehtiio Horn (Kanien’kehaka), Canada, 2025
• BeDevil (Remastered) – Tracey Moffatt (Australian Aboriginal), Australië, 1993