The Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival returns for its 19th edition from 25 September to 4 October 2026, bringing ten days of cinematic discovery to one of France’s major platforms for fantastic cinema.
Every September, just as the Rhine begins to flirt with autumn and Strasbourg’s medieval rooftops glow like embers at dusk, something strange stirs in the city. It starts as a whisper—an excited murmur in cafés, a glint in the eyes of students, cinephiles, gamers, and wandering dreamers. Then, suddenly, it becomes a roar.
The Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival is back, and for its 19th edition, it doesn’t simply return: it erupts.
For ten delirious days, from 25 September to 4 October 2026, Strasbourg transforms into Europe’s temporary capital of cinematic imagination.
The city becomes a living organism, humming with film reels, neon lights, VR headsets, midnight screams, philosophical debates, and the unmistakable perfume of popcorn mixed with existential dread.
It’s a festival where ghosts, monsters, androids, cursed lovers, rogue AIs, and morally questionable pigs coexist peacefully with families pushing strollers and retirees comparing notes on Japanese animation.
The festival’s beating heart remains its international fantastic film selection—forty or so new productions from every corner of the planet, some arriving fresh from their world premieres, others sneaking in as tantalizing previews.
This year’s line-up feels like a cinematic treasure hunt: Indonesian workplace horror where exhaustion becomes possession; Japanese ghost stories colliding with home-invasion nightmares; Australian supernatural fever dreams where desire itself becomes a violent force. And that’s just the competition.
Wander further and you stumble into Crossovers, where noir, action, and psychological thrillers mutate into genre hybrids that defy polite categorization.
One minute you’re watching a disgraced athlete chase death through neon-lit alleys; the next, you’re trapped in a Polish moral labyrinth where a couple tries to rehabilitate a delinquent by locking him up like a cursed relic.
Animation, too, gets its own riotous spotlight. Chinese pilgrim pigs, Brazilian odysseys of dysfunctional families, French paper-cut absurdism—each film feels like a dispatch from a parallel universe where imagination is the only currency.
And when the sun goes down, Strasbourg unleashes its infamous Midnight Movies: punk slashers, killer bears, deranged tennis academies, and prison-set supernatural carnage. These screenings are less “cinema” and more “collective fever dream,” with audiences cheering, gasping, and occasionally screaming in delighted terror.
But the festival is never just about films.
It’s about Strasbourg itself, a city that embraces the fantastic with the enthusiasm of a child discovering its first monster movie.
The streets fill with zombie walks, museum happenings, open-air screenings, master classes, digital art installations, and the beloved Fantastic Village—a playground where families, geeks, cinephiles, and curious passersby mingle under strings of glowing lanterns.
In past years, the festival projected Jaws in the city’s Art Nouveau bathhouse, complete with floating armchairs. Nobody knows what madness they’ll attempt next, but everyone knows it will be unforgettable.
Connexions, the festival’s digital arts and VR hub, continues to expand like a benevolent technological beast.
Indie game developers showcase their wildest creations, VR filmmakers invite audiences into 360-degree worlds where reality bends and breaks, and digital artists transform the space into a laboratory of future storytelling. It’s here that you realize fantastic cinema isn’t just a genre—it’s a frontier.
And then there’s the festival’s proud badge of honor: its affiliation with the Méliès International Festivals Federation.
Strasbourg remains the only festival in France to host both Silver Méliès competitions for features and shorts, sending its champions onward to compete for the Golden Méliès. It’s a reminder that beneath the chaos, humor, and spectacle, the festival is also a serious engine of European genre cinema.
The 2026 retrospective dives headfirst into artificial intelligence—Kubrick’s monolith looming over the program like a cosmic warning.
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Her, from dystopian nightmares to sentimental machine-love stories, the selection feels eerily timely.
As the world debates autonomy, alignment, and the future of humanity, Strasbourg screens films that have been whispering these anxieties for decades. Watching them now feels like reading prophecy.
And presiding over this year’s festivities is Guest of Honour Fabrice du Welz, a filmmaker whose cinema dances on the razor’s edge between beauty and brutality. His master class and film showcase promise revelations, shocks, and perhaps a few emotional bruises.
Strasbourg attracts legends—Catherine Breillat, John Landis, Lucky McKee, Robert Rodriguez, Enzo G. Castellari, William Lustig—and countless others who wander its cobblestone streets during the festival, blending seamlessly with fans who grew up worshipping their work. Here, everyone stands in the same queue, drinks at the same bars, laughs at the same midnight screenings.
Hierarchies dissolve. Cinema becomes communion.
By the time the closing film Hope rolls its final credits, the city is exhausted, exhilarated, and slightly transformed.
People leave with tote bags full of memories, notebooks full of recommendations, and hearts full of cinematic adrenaline.
Strasbourg returns to its everyday rhythm—but only on the surface. Underneath, the pulse of the festival continues to beat, waiting for next year’s eruption.
Because once you’ve lived ten days inside the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival, you don’t just remember it.
You ache for it.
The Strasbourg European Film Festival focuses on new international productions across fantastic cinema, while also embracing thrillers, noir, black comedy, video games and virtual reality, alongside retrospectives and events dedicated to cinema heritage.
As an Affiliated Member of the Méliès International Festivals Federation, Strasbourg is the only festival in France to organise both the Méliès d’argent Feature Film and Short Film competitions.
The winners will qualify for the Méliès d’or competitions, presented at a designated MIFF festival.
2026 Festival: first line-up
The European Fantastic Film Festival is back for its 19th edition from September 25 to October 4 and is featuring a series of new international productions, some not shown before and others as preview screenings.
The forty or so films that, as every year, will make up the official selection, will include the titles below, which might inspire you to take an extra week’s holiday.
In the international fantastic film competition, Sleep No More, a dark comedy horror movie by the Indonesian director Edwin, tackles the sensitive subject of workplace exploitation, featuring employees who become possessed by an entity when they are exhausted by their work. With Never After Dark, a Japanese production, Dave Boyle succeeds in combining a ghost story with a home invasion thriller by reimagining the character of the medium, thanks largely to a remarkable performance by the Japanese actress Moeka Hoshi. The Australian film Leviticus by Adrian Chiarella features two teenagers grappling with a violent supernatural force that takes the form of the person they most desire.
In the Crossovers competition, Sidharta Tata’s breathtaking new Indonesian action film Ikatan Darah could be summed up as a female version of The Raid. The Taiwanese movie Dead End, a film noir by Chan Chun-Hao inspired by a true story, follows, over the course of a night of frantic pursuit, a disgraced former athlete who discovers a death betting ring where gamblers put money on the date of death of terminally ill patients. In The Good Boy, the Polish director Jan Komasa succeeds in blending a sequestration thriller with a dream-like tale of a couple who lock up a young delinquent in an attempt to expunge the evil inside him and put him back on the right track.
In the international animated film competition, Nobody, a Chinese production directed by Yu Shui, tells the story of ordinary characters – a little wild pig, accompanied by a toad, a weasel and a gorilla – who find the courage they need to become heroes during an eventful pilgrimage. From Brazil, Son of a Bitch by Erica Maradona, Tania Anaya, Otto Guerra and Sávio Leite follows the tumultuous journey of Ismael, who leaves his mother’s home in search of his father and the ocean, accompanied by his lame dog. With Blaise, Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue use paper cut-outs and digital photomontage to create a dark and absurd comic tale centred on the Sauvage family, whose members are obsessed with their image and whose son Blaise, spurred on by a young girl, embarks on a revolutionary crusade out of sheer politeness.
The Midnight Movies will add a touch of festive gore to the line-up, starting with Penny Lane is Dead by the Australian director Mia Kate Russell, a punk slasher that harks back to the Ozploitation films of the 1980s.
Having shown his debut feature, Der Bunker, at the Festival, the German director Nikias Chryssos marks his return with Bloody Tennis, a blend of horror comedy and the hallucinatory trip, set in an unorthodox tennis academy where only the most ferocious players will manage to survive. Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar returns to the international scene with Ghost in the Cell, which will delight his fans with his usual gory excesses, this time set in a high-security prison in which an entity slaughters the prisoners with the darkest auras.
Echoing our retrospective focusing on artificial intelligence, Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in The Machine sounds the alarm and shatters the hype surrounding AI by examining the philosophical, cultural and political foundations of the AI boom and the challenges we will all face in the future.
Anthony Frith’s hilarious documentary Mockbuster takes us behind the scenes at The Asylum, a studio specialising in Sharknado-style B-movies, as we follow the chaotic journey of an Australian director who is asked to make a monster movie on a shoestring budget in just six days.
