Name: Insecticide
Director: Paula Gallego

Fantastic cinema is where filmmakers go to break the contract of realism, and its European festival circuit has become a proving ground for that gesture. The two films Lund Fantastic Film Festival chose to crown this year share a design more than a genre. By their own synopses, each starts from a familiar premise, a woman in crisis fleeing to a remote inn, a detective investigating a disappearance in a village, before opening into something stranger, shaped by dream, myth and desire. Director Julie Pacino’s I Live Here Now took Best International Feature Film, while Serbian director Pavle Vučković’s Frost won the Méliès d’Argent for Best European Fantastic Feature Film.

I Live Here Now is the writing and directing debut of Pacino, a Los Angeles filmmaker and photographer and the daughter of Al Pacino. Lucy Fry plays Rose, an aspiring actor who flees an impossible pregnancy for a remote place called the Crown Inn, only to find that the hotel opens onto a vivid psychological landscape where memory leaks into the present and the residents seem to embody her fear, desire and trauma. The festival places it in the lineage of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch, with the feverish colour of Dario Argento, calling it a psychodrama about identity, generational trauma and bodily autonomy. The Lynch connection is literal as well as tonal: Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, is in the cast alongside Madeline Brewer and Matt Rife.

Frost, a second feature, comes from a director with a Cannes pedigree. Vučković’s shorts Run Rabbit Run and Minus were both awarded in the Cinéfondation competition, and his debut, Panama, premiered at the festival. His new film follows Mirjana, a rational, guarded police detective from Belgrade played by Kamka Tocinovski, who travels to an isolated village in eastern Serbia to investigate a young woman’s disappearance and finds a community where pagan belief is a living force rather than folklore. Cineuropa, reviewing its premiere in the Official Fantastic Competition at Sitges, described it as a diptych: a straight police procedural that breaks, halfway through, into something inspired by a myth from the region. The cut between registers is the argument, and Lund’s jury rewarded the wager.

A hand reaching toward a frost-covered shape hanging in the branches of a tree in Frost by Pavle Vuckovic — Frost. Image: Plan9, via Cineuropa

The Méliès d’Argent matters beyond Lund. Both Méliès winners, Frost and the short Mom Says This, Dad Says That by Lund-based filmmaker LéaCati Vallier, now compete for the Méliès d’Or, the top award of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation for the year’s best European fantastic film. Vallier’s film is an intimate family story about the pressure to be seen. The Méliès jury comprised Johan Simonsson of Filmcentrum Syd, educator Therese Granwald and photographer and producer Anders Brandt.

Korean filmmaker Haeji Jeong’s animated Dinner was named Best International Short Film, Karl Bergholtz’s I Just Want to Hear Her Voice won the Finn Fantastic award for Best Swedish Short Film, and Spanish director Paula Gallego’s animated Insecticide took the Future of Fantastic award for Best Student Short Film.

The winners were announced at the closing ceremony at Kino in Lund on 4 November, ending an edition that ran from 28 October. I Live Here Now, which premiered at Fantasia in 2025 before stops at Locarno and Edinburgh, is distributed by Utopia. Frost is produced by Plan9 and sold internationally by Elle Driver.

Tags: Lund Fantastic Film Festival, film festival awards, Frost, I Live Here Now, Julie Pacino, Méliès d'Argent