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>> Desperate Danes, kleptomaniac Koreans,
world-class chefs and more at the Festival
du Nouveau Cinéma’s final weekend

by MATTHEW HAYS

The 36th edition of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema wraps this Sunday, and when it does, it will have left some good moviegoing memories. This year’s edition was a good example of solid programming and curatorship, with the event benefiting tremendously from its placement on the calendar. The FNC has long been able to pluck the very best from the Toronto International Film Fest and Venice—meaning that while it’s smaller in scope than the World Film Fest, it often seems to pack a bigger wallop.

The weekend will afford you another chance to see the fest’s opening film, Durs à cuire (the title translates to Hard to Cook), the culinary documentary about two of Montreal’s most prominent chefs, Normand Laprise (head chef and owner of Toqué!) and

Martin Picard (chef and owner of Au Pied de Cochon). The chefs were followed around by a doc film crew for 18 months, and since the cameras were around them virtually 24/7, it meant the chefs and their teams let their guards down, ultimately revealing some of the stranger and funnier moments involved in being a world-class chef. Interestingly enough, director Guillaume Sylvestre doesn’t spend too much time showing us the final touches thrown on in the kitchen; instead, we see many of the other less expected elements involved in getting that perfect meal on our table.

Screening today (Thursday) is Daisy Diamond, the Danish film that is being heralded as a brilliant homage to Ingmar Bergman. The story involves one young woman desperate to land a career in acting, but finds coping in Copenhagen harder than she’d initially expected. She soon finds herself a struggling single mother, and the intense pressures she faces begin to erode her sanity. Director Simon Staho is being praised for this quiet and desperate feature.

In the brutal and stylish Brazilian feature Bog of Beasts, director Cláudio Assis takes us into a world of poverty and horror. On a nightly basis, a man forces his granddaughter to strip for men to pull in some cash. As with City of God, Assis shows us the gruelling conditions many Brazilians live under, through fiction feature-length filmmaking. South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook is back with I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK, in which a young woman stuck in a psychiatric hospital who’s convinced that she’s a robot falls for a kleptomaniac and fellow psych-ward patient.

Two crucial Canuck filmmakers have local premieres at the FNC. Bruce McDonald (Hardcore Logo) returns with The Tracey Fragments, his hugely ambitious adaptation of the Maureen Medved novel of the same name. Ellen Page plays the lead, Tracey, a girl who runs away from home after her brother disappears. This intense and complex film asks us to decide what to watch, as it allows the fragments of the story to unfold in a complex series of split screens and multiple images. And Denys Arcand is back with L’Âge des ténèbres (Days of Darkness), arguably the most watched follow-up in the history of Canadian cinema (his last film, The Barbarian Invasions, won the Oscar, among a gazillion other awards). Here, Arcand looks deep into the soul of contemporary Quebec, and what he finds is not very pretty. Featuring a detached and very clever performance by Marc Labrèche.

The Festival du nouveau cinéma runs through
Sunday, Oct. 21. For more info and showtimes, see www.nouveaucinema.ca

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