Fantastic Fest 2026: ‘Death of a Yellow Bird’ Leaves a Man Alone with a Camcorder and a Voice
Black Fawn

It can be challenging to find new ways to spin Found Footage. Many have done it, using things like Screen Life or mockumentaries to get scares from in-world recorded videos. Mashing it will technology as a conduit to connections to the supernatural, there arises other ways to squeeze terror from lenses and blinking red lights. That’s what Death of a Yellow Bird does, using a VHS camera and old videos as a medium between the living and the dead.

Ari Millen (sprinting to his moniker as a Canadian Horror Darling) leads as a man who has chosen to refuse treatment for his cancer and to visit his childhood home to gain a sense of closure. Digging through family relics, he dusts off some home movies that take him back to a time with his late younger brother, Danny. While his family is trying to pluck him out of his dour exploration, he falls deeper into his dark project when he discovers that Danny seems to be able to communicate with him through the retro camcorder. Speaking in code, as ghosts often do, Danny seems to feed him cryptic information trying to coax him to find the truth about his death. Flashes of a sparkling childhood, a mother with memory issues, and a sneering father, raise questions of reality, truth, and what levels of grief any one of us is able to accept.

This project was very personal for writer director Cody Calahan, as well as his lead. They used their art as a gateway to explore their challenging experiences in the way a camera was a gateway to another world. It feels baked into the story, how a man is in turmoil during his supernatural experience, willing to forgo anything rational on his quest for closure.

“The team behind Undertone” is an apt label, even though the creatives are different (Calahan produced that one, and his usual collaborators from Black Fawn worked somewhere on both). Like that horror banger, this one focuses on a single seen character in a trauma filled childhood home whose only connection to the outside world comes via phone call. Similarly, the lead is left to their own devices, often trying to find real-world corporeal connections to the audio that gets to them through their devices. But Millen’s character is doing something very different, dealing with sadness more than fear, as he focuses his energy on solving something instead of running from it.

It’s “grief” horror, but Death of a Yellowbird is using a medium mashup to explore that. There are jump scares, some brooding moments, and it’s all part of a slow burn leaving its lead to discover something more terrifying than the reality already set up in its opening. Videos are yellow tinted and shiny, the present is blue tinted and grim, and the movie revels in the lead slowly pulling those images together.

Death of a Yellow Bird had its world premiere Fantastic Fest 2026

Tiff 2026: The Treaty 6 Team is Definitely Not The Mighty Ducks in ‘Smudge the Blades’

When describing the iteration of his decade-in-the-making hockey movie, Cody Lightning explained how his comedy morphed into a dramedy the more he explored the heavy concepts related to his story. For young indigenous hockey players, racism, sexism, drugs, poverty, and the like informed the themes of his story which altered its genre.

And though they’re ultimately on different ice rinks, his story has a lot in common with everyone’s favourite story of an underdog hockey team, The Mighty Ducks. A messy, begrudged coach, a coed team, a player who’s outgrown the league, and a league they have to try to live up to all inform the story of both of these teams, but with the Cree creator steeping his in indigeneity, there are marked differences in themes and tone.

The Treat 6 Blades are a struggling rag tag group. Their skillset is spread and they experience overt racism from the league and their rough coach (Ed Helms, playing against type as a harsh retired hockey player raining terror upon his team). When they’re kicked out of their league for playing rough (one bad hit is all it takes for a team of indigenous youth), they band together with a scrappy new coach in it for all the wrong reasons. The kids have big dreams that they hope hockey can deliver to them, so losing a league spot is an unfathomable hit. They’ll have to rely on their coach to straighten himself up and then them so they can have a chance at battling on the ice in a world where fairness isn’t an option.

Though the team and coach are scrappy and rag tag, this is hardly a comedy story. The kids’ parents struggle with drugs, money, and views on sexuality. The kids themselves are forced to manage that on their own, if that means begging for their equipment back from a pawn shop or bearing the weight of being a family’s golden goose. Lightning’s story is often pitch black, and he resists even a quip on the ice for levity.

But that’s the story he’s telling, something different from the snappy funny indigenous hockey tales peppered into Letterkenny or Shoresy. He’s not shying away from a bleak reality, he is using hockey to portray it and also to create a space of hope and light for the youth on his screen.

The hockey scenes don’t always look smooth or professional, though some of the actors are hockey players first. But there’s a distinct awareness of shooting (film, not pucks) on the ice, and scenes in the rink look slick though naturalistic. Much of the drama takes place in a dingy bar, a chipping locker room, or a rink’s parking lot which will feel like familiar locales for life for anyone who’s been a youth chasing the show (or anyone who’s consumed other hockey flicks like Goon). The story feels true and honest and gives hope to young people up against odds they might not be able to overcome.

Smudge the Blades isn’t a feel-good underdog sports story, but it shares that DNA. It’s a sometimes bleak but otherwise beautiful story about team sports and how they create found family, opportunity, and camaraderie in a world where you’re asked to shoot from the red line.