This is what it feels like to premiere your film at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.

It is, as the local english speaking population would say, awesome. Later that night I discuss the word “awesome” with Mitch who runs the festival who was politely saying how he preferred my use of the more British word “wonderful”, but I like “awesome”. Break it down and really taste the meaning, taste the awe, that breathless, heart stopping glimpse at the blissful scale of reality. Awesome makes you tiny before something vast.

I sometimes think that the process of flying has to be awful, otherwise we’d be too aware of how awesome it is. If you could just be on a plane and look out of the window at that tiny legoland city with its neatly scattered parks and decorous bridges, the boats ploughing white lines up to the Old Port, if you could do all of that in an unfettered instant then your mind would explode at the audacious beauty of it all. So we have to have airports. We have to have airport signage that directs you confidently and clearly to almost exactly where you shouldn’t be. We have to have airport security checks and pissy rules about volumes of harmless liquids. Airline food is surely scientifically balanced to stop your brain bursting with joy by being exactly just utterly foul enough to distract you from marvelling at the fact that you are a monkey in a tin can hanging thousands of feet in the cold blue air above Montreal. It really is awesome.

I’ve never really thought about Quebec but suddenly I’m in the middle of it; a strange through-the-looking-glass world that is both recognisably North American and also utterly French. A vision of the future we could have had if Napoleon had won Waterloo and turned his attentions West. I assumed I’d find a melting pot culture where baguettes and burgers were on every menu, but though most people are easily bilingual the anglophone and les francophonie share little beyond a strange addiction to gravy sodden chips with cheese. “It has to be squeaky” I’m told in a bar “Squeaky Canadian cheese!” Actually the addiction isn’t strange, chips, gravy and cheese is clearly moorish but the civic pride in the dish of Poutine is truly astonishing. Without fail everyone I ask about Poutine drops instantly into unaffected raptures that would make Proust blush and hurry up dunking his madeleines. But beyond Poutine the divide is surprisingly deeply felt, though the remark “they don’t even speak proper French!” sounds tellingly like the withering remark of an old married couple.

On my last day in the city I also wander across a First Nations dance ceremony. First Nations because there are three indigenous communities who somehow lived here for hundreds of years without either chips or gravy. It’s hard to tell if the dancing, which has drawn a large crowd of tourists, is a ceremony for them or us. I’m jetlagged and walking through a dream and find something forlorn in the drumming of their feet on the burning tarmac of the car park of a multi-storey office block, the hot ground refusing to crack open to reveal the ancestral earth below.

These are not the only tribes I encounter in Montreal. Fantasia is a genre film festival founded in 1996 but the introduction of an international film market a few years ago has seen the event blossom into a near month long marathon of all that is weird, wonderful and bloody in international cinema. By the time I arrive the festival is in its last few days, the market has finished and no one has to dress up to look like a zombie. I turn up just in time to see the midnight screening of “TURBO KID” which played in SXSW with us. It’s a pastiche of ’80s sci-fi and video-nasties done with such total devotion and love that it is impossible not to fall in love with it in turn. Seeing this film play its home crowd is a whole other experience though, many of the cast are locals and their many and ingeniously gruesome deaths are met with whoops of delight. The rapturous response at the end is no surprise since the film got a standing ovation before it started. Something else happened before it started too – as the cinema lights dim the crowd start mewing like cats. This happens before every film at Fantasia, apparently a tradition that started out of admiration for the British animated series “Simon’s Cat” which played here a few years back. There are a couple of muttered complaints about this caterwauling but I’ve not felt many cinemas become so completely owned by their audience before.

“NINA FOREVER” is amongst the last films to play and the festival team are delighted and a little surprised by the size of our audience. I’m simply astonished. Awestruck. They applaud, they mew, they laugh, they give great gasps of shock at one point I’m not going to tell you about and they applaud all over again as the credits roll.

It is a tremendous honour to share our film with this audience, in this space which after three weeks has clearly become home. The psychogeography of Montreal is layered and complicated and makes more sense from the air but that room is very definitely free from the constraints of being either French or Canadian. That room belongs entirely to Mitch and whoever he is kind enough to invite to share it with him.