This text is part of the special Cinema section
Carol Nguyen, Katherine Jerkovic and Micheline Lanctôt recall their experience at Concordia University’s Mel-Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Beyond university training, the School allows students to distinguish themselves and build lasting relationships in a booming industry.
No Crying at the Dinner Table traveled the world. The documentary that Carol Nguyen made during her bachelor’s degree at Concordia University’s Mel-Hoppenheim School of Cinema has indeed been selected in more than 80 international festivals and has won fifteen awards, notably at South by Southwest. , in Texas, and at the Montreal International Documentary Meetings.
“I made this very intimate short film on intergenerational communications and trauma as part of my classes in 2018. I had no idea this turn of events! No Crying at the Dinner Table had its world premiere at TIFF and was selected for the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, the largest documentary festival in the world,” she proudly explains.
If documentaries are Carol Nguyen’s first love, the richness of the programs offered by the Mel-Hoppenheim School of Cinema will also have enabled her to learn about fiction and, above all, to open up to a universe without limit. “Courses essentially oriented towards the arts are Concordia’s signature. The emphasis is not on dramaturgy, but on elements of cinematographic language, ”explains Katherine Jerkovic, for her part a graduate in the early 2000s.
The career of the latter within the Montreal university even made her aware of all that cinema can be. “We arrive there with a few references, but we finally discover experimental cinema, avant-garde or even distant countries,” she adds. We recognize [un ancien étudiant] of Concordia thanks to its unique and particular way of approaching cinema. “An influence that is now inscribed in his” filmmaker DNA “, she says.
The director of Coyote (2022) and Roads in February (2018) also emphasizes that the large number of students from diverse backgrounds and cultures is of great importance and contributes, according to her, to the affirmation of talents. The actress Micheline Lanctôt, who notably counted Katherine Jerkovic among her students in her acting and directing classes at the Mel-Hoppenheim Film School, is delighted in this regard to have access to this extraordinary pool of cultures.
“When students from across Canada — Quebec, Newfoundland, Alberta, etc. — meet Israelis, Palestinians, Venezuelans, Colombians or Chinese, for example, it creates unexpected exchanges! she enthuses. Micheline Lanctôt, who makes it a point of honor to facilitate interculturality in the classroom, believes that being in contact with other cultures is an excellent way for her students to position themselves as filmmakers. She remembers, among other things, the very particular way in which the Iranians consider the drama, “with a lot of humanism”. “My job largely consists of establishing a bridge between Quebec and foreign students,” she explains.
The Concordia Canvas
Micheline Lanctôt also points out that the other main strength of the Mel-Hoppenheim Film School is its network of contacts. “While working in the industry, I started to see more and more alumni move into assistant director and production assistant positions. They, in turn, set about hiring other graduates from different Concordia cohorts. That’s how it all started. Today, it is therefore not uncommon to come across several former Concordia students on a film set.
“There is no organized network, but we recognize each other and find each other naturally, thanks to our affinities. We are people with atypical and marginal artistic backgrounds who have cinema at heart, and our paths inevitably cross at some point,” adds Katherine Jerkovic.
Keeping in touch with former students of the school is also an almost inexhaustible source of opportunities. “We always come across people who have gone through Concordia in the Quebec film industry. Since we stay in contact with our collaborators, friendships are born,” says Carol Nguyen. It was therefore obvious that the latter was going to call on former students for her recent short fiction film, nanitic.
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