Fest of Quebec’s best

>> Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois
toasts the province’s film milieu

RIVETING SHORT: The Colony

by MATTHEW HAYS

It’s been another weird and wacky year for Quebec filmmakers. There were much-anticipated films that proved critical disappointments, like François Girard’s Silk and Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, while Nitro and Les 3 p’tits cochons proved, were there any doubt remaining, that Quebecers are eager to see local stories on the big screen. This year, the 26th annual Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (RVCQ) will screen most of what Quebec filmmakers created over the past 12 months.

Easily one of the most audacious films of the past year was Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives), Denis Côté’s strange ode to Internet romance; the writer-director brought two actors over from Bulgaria who improvise their way through the film. Shot on the cheap, it’s an unusual feature that commanded a good deal of attention at the Toronto Film Fest where it premiered in September. Not everyone was smitten, however. NOW magazine put Nos vies on its worst-of-the-fest list. Côté was philosophical about the occasional critical jab: “My previous film, Les États nordiques, was made for $100,000, Our Private Lives for $20,000, on video, hand-held, with minimum crew. Both films were made with very free-spirited guerrilla approaches. Both films are very minimalist too. Some critics or film buffs are allergic to that urgency and react strongly to it.”

Quirky inspiration was in good supply this year; take the latest collaboration between director Émile Gaudreault and Steve Galluccio, Surviving My Mother (their follow-up to Mambo Italiano), in which Caroline Dhavernas plays a nymphomaniac struggling to smooth over her tortured relationship with her overbearing mom. Internet sex, amorous priests, dying grandmothers—this movie has everything. Joshua Dorsey gathered together a group of Montreal youth in one of our most culturally diverse neighbourhoods, then got them to explore various storylines to create The Point, a feature about hope and despair on Montreal’s grittiest streets. And in The Fourth Life, François Miron imagines one young woman confronting a former lover after arriving in a surreal, unsettling small town.

Hot docs

The RVCQ also highlights Quebec’s legion of talented documentarians. Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze is a standout, venturing to a brave new China to find out how the nation’s poverty-stricken are dealing with rapid economic growth. It’s a film that’s both poetic and moving, earning the praise it’s already garnered. Howard Goldberg also ventures to China, but uses the journey as one point of examination into our height-obsessed culture, in S&M: Short and Male. Goldberg finds that the Chinese favour using any means—including unbelievably painful leg-lengthening medical techniques—to get taller. Manuel Foglia’s Paroles et liberté, Bourgault, tracks the life of celebrated writer and politician Pierre Bourgault. And Mary Ellen Davis examines the crucial role that music plays in the life of Mexican culture in Los Musicos, an hour-long doc. Joe Balass’s Baghdad Twist will have its Montreal premiere at the RVCQ; the filmmaker looks back at his Jewish family’s flight from Iraq in 1970. In Being Innu, Catherine Mullins illustrates the unique and often dire challenges faced by six Innu youth—they grapple with substance abuse, lack of opportunity and sky-high suicide rates.

The 26th RVCQ also features several biographies, including I Want to Be Happy, Ari A. Cohen’s look at the life of jazz and blues legend Jackie Washington, Seydou Kane’s Falardeau, about Quebec’s most prominent separatist filmmaker, and Le Dernier envol, Yves Langlois’s elegiac portrait of Claude Messier, the late disabled activist.

RVCQ showcases the short works of Quebec filmmakers, and the films I’m looking forward to are Karl Hearne’s Stuff, Benjamin Steiger Levine’s Zackary Samuel: Illusionist and Jeff Barnaby’s riveting The Colony.

This year, 10 films will be screened at the new Segal Centre for the arts. These films, which include Helene Klodawsky’s Family Motel and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Le Ring, are finalists for the Alex and Ruth Dworkin Prize for the promotion of tolerance in cinema. The RVCQ will also offer master classes in directing by Yves Simoneau and screenwriting by Oscar-winning filmmaker Denys Arcand.

Les Rendez-vous du cinéma
québécois screens from Feb. 14–24.
Info: www.rvcq.com

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