The Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), which takes place from October 9 to 20, offers a range of the most anticipated films of the season, several of which have been presented at the biggest festivals in the world. Here are six that our columnist has seen in recent months at the Cannes and Berlin festivals.
A universal languageby Matthew Rankin
The second feature film by Quebecer Matthew Rankin (The twentieth century) will open the FNC this Wednesday, October 9 after winning the Audience Award at the Cannes Filmmakers’ Fortnight and that for best Canadian discovery at the Toronto Festival. This charming absurd comedy, set in a reinvented 2000s, is an enigmatic work that goes from comical to dreamlike. It’s the story of two elementary school students, Negin and Nazgol, who find a bank note stuck in ice. They will seek help from Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg, the hometown of Matthew Rankin (a character in the film), where everyone speaks Persian and the second language is not English, but Persian. French bequeathed by Louis Riel.
Presented this Wednesday, October 9 at 7 p.m. at the Monument-National and Friday, October 18 at 7 p.m. at the Cinéma du Parc
A familyby Christine Angot
Christine Angot returns in the novel The journey to the East about the repeated rapes she suffered from the age of 13, from the moment she first met her father, during a trip to Strasbourg. A family is in a way a supplement in images to the novel. It’s a documentary that doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Neither the outbursts of anger nor the verbal or physical violence of the novelist, who puts everyone around her in the dock, with her accusatory camera. Christine Angot no longer tolerates complacency and inertia, euphemisms and weak excuses. It offers direct cinema at its most destabilizing, at its most uneasy, at its most impactful. And at its most authentic.
Presented on Saturday, October 12 at 6:30 p.m. at the Latin Quarter and Wednesday, October 16 at 8 p.m. at the Cinéma du Musée
The seeds of the wild fig treeby Mohammad Rasoulof
Iranian dissident Mohammad Rasoulof won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in May thanks to this brilliant political film which implicitly deals with the assassination in Tehran in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old young woman arrested for “wearing the veil inappropriate “. The official weapon carried by Iman, a newly promoted investigating judge of the revolutionary tribunal, disappears from his apartment and he suspects his wife and daughters. Rasoulof transposes into a family without history the deleterious effects of religious obscurantism, nationalist propaganda and the yoke of theocracy. His film, which descends into a paranoid spiral and a climate of denunciation worthy of a psychological thriller, is a full-blown attack on the Iranian dictatorship, its corruption and its misogyny.
Presented on Sunday, October 13 at 5 p.m. at Concordia University and Saturday, October 19 at 8 p.m. at the Cinéma du Musée
All We Imagine as Lightby Payal Kapadia
Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia (A Night of Knowing Nothing) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the luminous and poetic All We Imagine as Light. The 38-year-old filmmaker’s first fiction feature focuses on economic, social class and gender disparities in India, as well as religious tensions. Prabha, a nurse from Bombay without news of her husband who has been exiled in Europe for more than a year, lives in a shared apartment with Anu, a carefree young colleague, in love with a young Muslim man, a love that her parents would not approve of. Can we escape our destiny? asks Payal Kapadia in this subtle work, which emanates a gentle melancholy, which denounces the shackles which dictate the fate and existence of women.
Presented on Monday, October 14 at 4:15 p.m. and Sunday, October 20 at 4:30 p.m. at the Cinéma du Musée
Birdby Andrea Arnold
PHOTO ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA, PROVIDED BY FNC
Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a moody preteen, lives with her delinquent father in Birdby Andrea Arnold.
Birdby British director Andrea Arnold, is a coming-of-age story in the vein of social realism of her first two feature films, the excellent Red Road And Fish Tank. Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a moody pre-teen, lives with her delinquent father (Barry Keoghan) and brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in a squat in the heart of a deprived area of a small English town. She meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a candid young man in search of identity who shakes her out of her torpor. Filmed with a hand-held camera for the most part, as close as possible to the characters, Bird is interested in the fate of those left behind. For the first time, Andrea Arnold tries her hand at magical realism, and if the graft doesn’t quite take off, her film remains gripping thanks to its acuity and great sensitivity.
Presented on Sunday, October 13 at 7 p.m. at the Cinéma du Musée and Sunday, October 20 at 8 p.m. at Concordia University
Dahomeyby Mati Diop
Golden Bear of the most recent Berlin Festival, Dahomey is a fascinating impressionist and poetic documentary, with supernatural accents (likeAtlanticfirst feature film by Mati Diop, Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019). The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker is interested in the restitution by France to Benin, in 2021, of 26 works of royal treasures from Dahomey looted in the 19th centurye century. His atypical documentary finds its full meaning in the metaphysical questioning of the souls freed from these uprooted sculptures and in that, very concrete, of the students of the University of Abomey. Only 26 works, out of 7,000 looted, were returned. Is this an insult or the beginning of reparation? The question haunts this powerful film, barely an hour long, on colonization and its impact on the deculturation of African populations.
Presented on Wednesday, October 16 at 6 p.m. and Sunday, October 20 at 2:30 p.m. at the Cinéma du Musée
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