There was a lot of love and pride on the red carpet for the movie North of Albany which premiered at the Imperial Theater as part of the Cinemania festival on Monday night. Between Marianne Farley and Céline Bonnier in particular; the director comparing her lead actress to a Stradivarius and the actress talking about love at first sight with the director who has already been nominated for an Oscar.
Hyper excited, feverish and proud: this is how director and producer Marianne Farley explained feeling a few minutes before presenting her film North of Albany for the first time in front of an audience. It must be said that the director – nominated for the 2019 Oscars for her short film Marguerite in the category of Best Live Action Shorts – had been waiting for this moment for more than two years; the pandemic having delayed many stages of the creation of his feature film.
Photo QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
“I am very happy to find my actors this evening, she launched. They are so beautiful and good. I am blessed to have been able to work with them. I am proud to have done it in a pandemic context, and proud of this team which is so generous. Céline Bonnier is one of our great actresses in Quebec. »
Love at first sight
Same story with Céline Bonnier who remembers her first meeting with the director to talk about the project … on a park bench during a strong wave of the pandemic. The interpreter of the mother in North of Albany praised the rigorous and intelligent character of the filmmaker.
Photo QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
“I found the script very fair, very beautiful and very touching, added the 57-year-old actress. It was demanding to shoot in the middle of a pandemic with all the rules that delayed everything, but we succeeded. I also had another crush, for the young Zeneb Blanchet (who plays the role of her teenage daughter Sarah) who is quite an actress. »
Photo QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
The actress – who we will see from December 15 in Fragments, Serge Boucher’s new series – plays the role of Annie, a single mother of two children fleeing Montreal for the United States to save her daughter. This one will have, over the course of events, to face itself while going to meet others. The actress talks about a very impulsive, very maternal woman, but who also sometimes plays the role of “daughter’s daughter” to describe this character given to her by Marianne Farley.
A movie on the run
“The film is about encounters, relationships between human beings and parenthood,” added the filmmaker, herself the mother of two boys aged 12 and 18. the flash came to me during a car breakdown that I experienced with my sons in the United States and the anxiety that I felt at having felt alone. It’s a film about escape, parenthood and the incommunicability of people to each other sometimes. »
Photo QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
North of Albany is also based on a screenplay she co-wrote with her ex-spouse and father of her children, Claude Brie. “We decided to work on this adventure and make it a gift”, launched the director and producer who explains that she wants to exploit an angle, a genre and a way of making cinema that is different each time through her works.
Photo QMI Agency, Mario Beauregard
North of Albany also stars Eliott Plamondon (as the son), Rick Roberts, Kelly Depeault (who we saw in the film The Goddess of Fireflies), Frederic Pierre and Isabelle Giroux.
-The film Au nord d’Albany by Marianne Forley will be on screens in Quebec on December 2
-The 28th edition of the Cinemania festival continues until November 13, 2022