Eight plans for the weekend | To forget the cold and the snow…

For three nights only in Montreal, singer Roch Voisine continues his tour Americana Light and stops at the Casino de Montréal on January 18, 19 and 20. There are tickets left, but you have to hurry. Journalist Josée Lapointe followed the artist in October 2021, before his performance at Salle André-Mathieu in Laval. “Joyful and comforting”, “warm, but above all unpretentious”: these are the qualifiers she used to describe this show that feels good.

This Saturday, don’t miss the 5^e edition of the Nuit de la lecture, online but also in person for the first time in three years, in the four corners of Quebec. Alain Beaulieu, Roxanne Bouchard, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Fanie Demeule, Jean-Paul Eid, Catherine Éthier and a host of other writers invite you to bookstores and libraries for readings and exchanges around books. Online reading duos will also be broadcast live on Zoom for the occasion. From 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Laila Maalouf, The Press

Ideal event to combat the winter gloom through irony, self-mockery and black humour, the third night of depression will be presented on January 23 at the Théâtre St-Denis. Christian Bégin will again be the host of this evening inspired by a French concept, which was born in Montreal in January 2020 and whose second edition took place only in the spring of 2022, due to postponements linked to the pandemic. A whole new crop of artists will come to present a number during this unique show, including Ariane Moffatt, Rita Baga, Patsy Gallant, Vincent Vallières, Normand Brathwaite, Catherine Éthier and Martha Wainwright. It is Antoine Gratton who once again provides the musical direction for what each time turns out to be a great and funny moment of catharsis and which does much more good than harm.

Josee Lapointe, The Press

Tire le coyote is still on the road everywhere in Quebec until April with its show In the first round of evidence, but this performance at Théâtre Maisonneuve at Place des Arts will be the last visit to Montreal of this tour that began a year ago. An opportunity to dive into his poetic universe with a hovering atmosphere, dense perhaps, but through which the light always ends up passing. Slowness, breath and depth to start the year gently with an artist as honest as he is invested.

Josee Lapointe, The Press

After two virtual editions, the Quebec tour of the Banff Mountain Film Festival is back in theaters. The tour will stop in Montreal from January 18 to 22 before continuing on to 21 other cities in Quebec. This year, it will be mountaineering, of course, but also skiing, mountain biking, trail running and even slacklining over the clouds. Spectators will also be able to share the adventures of a couple of Canadian adventurers, Erik Boomer and Sarah McNair-Landry, during an expedition to Baffin Island. An exhibition of photos of major Quebec expeditions will welcome spectators in the foyer of the Pierre-Mercure room at UQAM.

Mary Tison, The Press

If you have planned a stay in the Capitale-Nationale, know that the Musée de la civilization de Québec presents the exhibition The time of the pharaohs until March 12. To accommodate the exhibits, the Musée de la civilization collaborated with the University of Aberdeen Museum (in the United Kingdom), the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum (in Germany) and the Gustav Lübcke Museum (in Germany). According to the daily journalist The sun Léa Harvey, “lovers of ancient Egypt need not worry”.

Saint-Omer won the Silver Lion for the Grand Jury Prize and the Lion for the Future for First Film at the last Venice Film Festival. Director Alice Diop (to whom we also owe the film We) was inspired by a story of infanticide that hit the headlines a few years ago in France. “Thanks to a naturalistic approach, very bare, a staging devoid of any artifice, the director exposes a practically inextricable scenario. It thus forces the viewer to question preconceived ideas, without in any way directing his judgment”, affirms our journalist Marc-André Lussier, who qualifies the film as “extremely powerful”.

Canadian director Sarah Polley is back after an absence of just over ten years. Women Talking tells the story of women victims of violence in their community who wonder whether they should leave or stay and debate the consequences of their choices. According to our columnist Marc Cassivi, Sarah Polley “delivers one of the most brilliant films of the past year and the most accomplished feature film of her career”.