by MATTHEW HAYS

There are still a few days left in the inaugural edition of the New Montreal FilmFest. And I’ve got to hand it to the organizers and programmers of this event, I think there have been some intriguing, fun and worthwhile entries screening here. What follows are a few points of interest for those hankering for a bit more viewing pleasure.

Saul Metzstein’s second feature film Guy X is part of the fest’s official competition. It stars Jason Biggs as an enlisted American officer who joins the military in 1979 as a means of avoiding jail time. To his chagrin, he’s assigned to a desolate base in icy Greenland. There, he meets the girl of his dreams, but also meets up with the mysterious Guy X, who’s recovering from war wounds from battle in Vietnam. Venerable Brit actor Jeremy Northam also stars. The Lithuanian entry Forest of the Gods depicts the struggles of a professor incarcerated by the Nazis. After the fall of the Third Reich, he decides to write about his experiences while living in the Soviet Union, only to learn that he’s in yet another repressive dictatorship and lands in a gulag.

As part of the tribute to local luminary Michel Brault, his 1994 entry Mon amie Max will screen. This film has one of Quebec’s biggest stars, Geneviève Bujold, play a woman who returns to Quebec after a 25-year absence to find out what happened to the son she gave up for adoption a quarter century earlier. In Yi Tong Lu’s Lost in Wu Song, a down-on-his-luck Chinese filmmaker struggles to make a biopic of the ultimate macho Chinese movie star. And in the Italian entry by Gianpaolo Tescari, Through the Eyes of Another, a couple find their lives changed forever after taking a Kurdish refugee into their home.

Georgi Djulgerov’s Lady Zee has Anelia Garbova playing a young woman with a knack for marksmanship. She’s soon hooked on firing off guns, and is very good at making the target—so good that she’s taken in by a gun enthusiast who teaches her all about firearms. The gun expert falls for Garbova, but she has no intention of settling down. In the theatre of the absurd department comes La Moustache, a French entry by Emmanuel Carrère, in which a man shaves off his moustache, one he has worn his entire adult life, and no one seems to notice that it’s gone. How could so much facial hair go unappreciated? Also from France comes Xavier Beauvois’s Le Petit lieutenant, in which a young rookie cop must deal with being in a squadron commandeered by a woman captain. And in Winter’s Children: The Silent Generation, German filmmaker Jens Schanze examines his country’s Nazi legacy through his own family’s history, attempting to shatter the silence that permeates German culture in regards to the Third Reich.

The New Montreal Filmfest continues until Sunday, Sept. 25. Info: www.montrealfilmfest.com

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