Backstage Madness (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026)

One of the things I enjoy about Fantasia Film Festival is the cosmopolitan nature of its programming as while they have big names and anticipated features, they also give space to movies from corners of the world that rarely get international visibility. I’d love to see more African features, but that’s an industry‑wide issue rather than something to lay at Fantasia’s feet – especially given the strong work they’re doing with Asian representation. Which brings us to Backstage Madness, a curiously Americanised, metatextual Kyrgyz comedy from Amanbek Azhymat that pre‑emptively deflates any criticism you might level at it – which is shrewd work from the writer‑director.

We open with a conversation between a “nerdy” young man and the film’s central character – a nameless 70‑year‑old director. The young man is, frankly, pretty lewd as he talks about a woman in the shower, but the director agrees with him – then pulls out a shotgun, murders him, and dumps his body in the bath with other disposed‑of “characters”. That’s the operative word because as soon as the young man is dispatched, the director’s confronted by people from all eras, genres, and styles. It turns out that we’re inside his imagination, his unfiltered creativity being made literal, and the chaotic throng representing every potential story from his past and future, all vying for attention and desperate to be chosen for his next feature. Then the phone rings, and it’s his producer with a new scheme – he’s going to charge benefactors a fee to be written into the director’s next script and cast as characters, overruling the director’s unruly creativity. The producer becomes the embodiment of corporate interests versus art, albeit a slightly chaotic one given how many benefactors appear in the wrap‑around narrative, but that’s the motif Azhymat is clearly aiming for.

Backstage Madness reveals its structure from here, bouncing between the director’s reality and the film he’s writing under commercial duress. It’s an interesting stance – writing a crime thriller while openly admitting you’re doing it for commercial reasons, and as I mentioned earlier, the film’s self‑awareness almost defangs any criticism. Another notable facet is that the movie he produces – which occupies most of the spry 80‑minute runtime – bears a deliberate resemblance to a Quentin Tarantino crime film. Not in the sense of homage, but in the sense of using Tarantino as shorthand for commercially safe, Americanised genre cinema. Azhymat isn’t glorifying him, but either positioning Tarantino as the endpoint of art bent into market‑friendly shapes, or perhaps suggesting that this is simply the lowest common denominator for Kyrgyz audiences – either way, it’s a pointed choice.

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The movie‑within‑the‑movie features multiple groups vying for a briefcase containing unknown item(s), a young man in debt to an organ‑harvesting gangster, a fight between two luchador‑masked men in an empty auditorium, two philosophising assassins, and a hitman couple who are in love. Tying them all together is fairly trite plot in which different factions vie for dominance, while the briefcase passes from one gang to another. It’s undeniably entertaining as a piece of comedic crime cinema – an intent typified by a scene in which a sex aid flies out of a hotel window and lands (and sticks) on the forehead of a bald hitman.

There are some great set‑pieces and dialogue within this internal narrative, and it’s shot with a slickness and real sense of place as a piece of Kyrgyzstani cinema, but here comes the critic‑proof fence – it’s almost as if the director (who, in the film’s canon, is writing this piece on the spot, which is indicated by the connective shots of him at his typewriter), gets bored of placating his producer’s whims. I’ve seen criticism that says it feels like a first draft, and you could argue that this is part of the script, a feature rather than a bug. None of the figures swirling around the director’s mind appear in this corporately motivated internal narrative, the story ending when a new character is introduced who has absolutely nothing to do with anything – a biker‑suited martial artist who abruptly concludes the movie‑within‑the‑movie. Returning to the director’s imagination – a mind palace not unlike the one in Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress – we see the biker‑clad martial artist absorbed into the director’s creative swirl to become another potential future story, so something good did come from the commercial exercise, at least for him.

You could say Backstage Madness is derivative of countless American crime films, but one of the benefactors explicitly asks for something like The Godfather. You could also say it needs more drafts, but this is literally the story of a writer‑director hammering out a first draft under pressure the film’s metatextuality shielding it from surface‑level criticisms with real deftness. Any critique beyond that requires meeting the film on its own terms, and from that perspective the only real sticking point is that, for a comedy, it isn’t especially funny – but it is interesting, which is precisely why Fantasia’s programming identity matters. Giving a film like this a platform is exactly what festivals should be doing, especially as it’s from a country that barely registers in Western film discourse. It’s messy, self‑aware, chaotic, and absolutely worth the space.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – BACKSTAGE MADNESS