The Fantasia International Film Festival — opening Thursday and running through Aug. 2 — turns 30 this year. Its long-standing artistic director Mitch Davis has been there since Year 2, and his enthusiasm for this continent’s largest genre film fest has only escalated over the decades.

Davis took in the fest’s inaugural edition as a spectator and was not only immediately smitten, but also convinced it had a future — one that included him.

He had figured he would be among 10 people standing in line outside the Imperial Theatre for the première screening of the Hong Kong action flick My Father Is a Hero, starring a then-little-known Jet Li. He figured wrong. There were hundreds of people in line, and some couldn’t even get in.

“I knew then I had to get involved,” Davis loves recalling. “I also realized there was a market for absolutely everything in this city.”

Montreal has been inundated with every kind of film festival imaginable. Not all survive. But Fantasia has flourished with its idiosyncratic focus on auteur-driven, indie esoterica.

As Davis puts it: “Fantasia is a celebration of the eccentric and unclassifiable, playing all films with equal importance.”

Fantasia has also made quite the name for itself beyond the city. Quentin Tarantino — who chose the fest for the North American debut of Inglourious Basterds — was effusive in his praise, calling Fantasia “the most important and prestigious genre film festival on this continent.” Director Guillermo del Toro was equally blown away, marvelling: “Fantasia is a shrine.”

No surprise that Fantasia has drawn the likes of John Carpenter, Ken Russell, Robert Pattinson, Mark Hamill, the Safdie brothers and Adam Wingard over the years.

“It’s a real privilege and gratifying to be able to do this,” Davis says. “Years ago, when the festival began, there was always a sense that so many of the filmmakers that we admired were almost single-handshakes of cinephilia, because many of the most interesting European and Asian genre films just didn’t get distributed........

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