by MATTHEW HAYS

Many film industry types now credit the Sundance Film Festival with revitalizing the independent cinema. Indeed, the Robert Redford-helmed event has become so huge it is now considered by some (including Redford himself) a victim of its own success.

Now, two trailblazers have decided Quebec should have its own version of Sundance, to take place in the picturesque spot of Mont Tremblant, an hour-and-a-half north of Montreal. With Louis Plamondon as its artistic director and François Rodrigue as its CEO, the inaugural edition of the Tremblant Film Festival will kick off this Wednesday, with a focus on independent cinema from Europe and the Americas.

This year’s entries include Down in the Valley, David Jacobson’s low-budget film in which Edward Norton plays a charming cowboy who falls madly in love with Evan Rachel Wood. It all seems perfectly sweet and innocent, until Wood realizes that Norton isn’t entirely well in the head. From Holland comes Erik van Zuylen’s The Mystery of the Sardine, about a Dutch philosophy professor who loses both his legs in a suicide bombing attack. Intent upon figuring out who did this to him and why, the professor and his wife are drawn into a strange and disturbing mystery.

In Christopher Warre Smets’ The Overlookers, a covert Manhattan group investigates various strangers to see if they are indeed dating material for people who are romantically intrigued. The film mixes absurd comedy with conspiratorial espionage. In Shooting Dogs, actor-cum-director Michael Caton-Jones explores the Rwandan massacre of the early ’90s. In this film, John Hurt and Hugh Dancy play two Brits at the scene of the crime, faced with the terrible consequences of inaction in the face of impending genocide. Requiem for Billy the Kid is filmmaker Anne Feinsilber’s ode to the Western genre. The story follows the investigation into the death of Billy the Kid at the hands of a power-hungry sheriff. Genre vet Kris Kristofferson stars. In Dominik Moll’s Lemming, a young couple arrive in a new small town to build their lives together. Things get nasty early on, as they find the dead corpse of a rodent blocking their kitchen drainage pipe. This unfortunate bit of plumbing is a bad omen of things to come. This film, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling and Laurent Lucas, kicked off the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. And in Enlightened by Fire, director Tristán Bauer explores the horrors of war, as one man looks back 20 years to his time served in the 1982 Falklands War.

DB Sweeney creates an unusual road movie in Dirt Nap, in which three average Joes head across the swampland together, hoping to get away from it all. While on the trek they discuss their own lives and their lost hopes and dreams. Cristina Comencini’s Don’t Tell was nominated for a Best-Foreign-Language-Film Oscar. In it, a young woman begins to have terribly disturbing dreams after learning she is pregnant. She then ventures to America to ask her brother, a professor at a university, for the answers to questions about their family’s shady past.

The Tremblant Film Festival screens Wednesday, June 14–Sunday, June 18. Info: 1-888-868-9162 or go to www.tremblantfilmfestival.org

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