Fantasia International Film Festival’s 28th edition running from July 18th through August 4th, 2024, will open with the World Premiere of Ant Timpson’s Bookworm. Reuniting the New Zealand filmmaker with his Come To Daddy star Elijah Wood (Showtime’s Yellowjackets) – who matches through-the-roof comic chemistry of gifted his young co-star Nell Fisher (Evil Dead Rise) – Bookworm is as entertaining as it is richly cinematic. Mildred (Fisher), a precocious eleven-year-old bookworm, escapes her humdrum existence by immersing herself in novels where literary adventures abound, with a long-dreamed quest to capture proof of a mythological beast known as The Canterbury Panther. When an unusual accident occurs, Mildred’s long absent father Strawn Wise (Wood), a washed-up illusionist, flies to New Zealand to look after a daughter he’s never met. When they agree to go camping despite neither being the outdoorsy type, this ultimate test in family bonding leads the duo on a string of increasingly absurd and treacherous adventures.