51st New Cinema Festival | The essentials of the FNC

Nearly 300 films will be presented in the coming days at the FNC, which runs until October 16. As usual, the festival is screening several feature films that have distinguished themselves at major festivals in recent months. Here are the films not to be missed, according to our journalists who have seen them in Cannes, Venice or Toronto.

Marc Cassivi
The Press

Marc-Andre Lussier
The Press

The Coyoteby Katherine Jerkovic

The second feature film by Quebecer Katherine Jerkovic (Roads in February), The Coyote, tells the story of a Montrealer in his fifties, of Mexican origin, who wants to find work as a chef after having to close his restaurant. He pays his rent by doing housekeeping at night in companies, then sends CVs. We gradually guess the reasons for his setbacks when his daughter, with whom he has broken ties, introduces him to her young son, whom she would like to entrust to him. Jorge Martinez Colorado, who we saw in the TV series Raspberry time, aptly embodies this immigrant torn between his professional future and his new responsibilities as a grandfather. Katherine Jerkovic offers a poignant and sensitive portrait of Quebec immigration. A film that draws its inspiration from the reality of Montreal, presenting characters that we still see too little in Quebec cinema. (M.C.)

Women Talkingby Sarah Polley

Women Talking, an adaptation of Canadian Miriam Toews’ novel of the same name, about sexual assault in a Mennonite religious community (from which the Manitoba novelist is based), is Sarah Polley’s first feature film in nearly a decade. This is a full-throttle charge against the patriarchy, well beyond religious shackles. A dozen women, victims of rape and violence in their community, are wondering if they should stay or leave, do nothing or react. The profound injustice they suffer, the state of slavery, of ignorance in which they are kept – they are illiterate – are appalling. It’s like the Middle Ages, while the story is set in 2010. This hard-hitting film, the most successful of Sarah Polley’s career, counts on an astonishing cast: Frances McDormand, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Ben Whishaw and Claire Foy . (M.C.)

EOby Jerzy Skolimowski

Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, 84, offers in EO a tribute, 56 years later, to the classic Random balthazar, by Robert Bresson, in a hallucinated version. That is to say that we follow the tribulations of a donkey (which is called EO; to be pronounced “hi-han”), from a circus in Poland to a cattle farm, passing through a match amateur soccer and a stay in a bourgeois villa in Italy, where a woman (Isabelle Huppert, on screen five minutes) smashes porcelain plates on a ceramic floor. During his strange epic, EO escapes several times hoping to find the circus artist who took care of him so well. This fable, poetic and melancholic, is as original as it is charming. (M.C.)

The Banshees of Inisherinby Martin McDonagh

fourteen years later In BruggeBrendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell reunite with filmmaker Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) in a very pleasing way in The Banshees of Inisherin. Using his talent as a dialogist, favoring a type of humor as singular as it is effective, McDonagh explores a rarely exploited theme: the end of a friendship. On a small island off the west coast of Ireland, where, in the 1920s, barely a handful of inhabitants lived and where the sense of community was very important, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) announced without warning to Pádraic (Colin Farrell ), whom he has known forever, that their friendship no longer exists. Winner of two awards at the Venice Film Festival (best screenplay award and Colin Farrell crowned best actor), The Banshees of Inisherin is a funny, touching and original film. You have to have a good ear for the Irish accent, but we are promised subtitles. So much the better. (WRONG.)

No Bearsby Jafar Panahi

Like all of the director’s most recent feature films, Taxi Tehran, No Bears was filmed clandestinely. However, the tone is much more serious this time. Taking his own role, Jafar Panahi, who has been serving a six-year prison sentence in Iran since July, tells two parallel stories, the main one being the one that puts him on stage with a small film crew. Unable to leave the country, he goes to a small village near the Turkish border, where the conflict between the urbanites of Tehran and the rural people of the village – between modernity and tradition – is quite intense. At the same time, the immigration desires of the Iranian couple that Panahi is filming come up against bureaucracy. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, No Bears has nothing in its tone of the kind of bonhomie that one usually finds in the films of Jafar Panahi. (WRONG.)

Petrov feverby Kirill Serebrennikov

Director of the remarkable LetoKirill Serebrennikov is a Russian filmmaker who has often had trouble with Vladimir Putin’s regime. Petrov fever, in the running for the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a long hallucinatory delirium stemming from a high fever from which a comic book author is afflicted. When we see this famous Petrov (Semyon Serzin), very flu, get off a bus and be immediately dragged to an improvised firing squad, we understand that Serebrennikov does not want to be in the lace. Not everything is of equal value in this explosive cocktail with accents trash, but the load is very strong. Note that the FNC also features Tchaikovsky’s wife. The filmmaker’s most recent, more classic film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. (WRONG.)