A first festival entirely dedicated to television series will take place this week in Montreal.
The event, simply called Montréal séries, will take place from September 4 to 7. It offers free screenings of international productions presented as world or North American premieres. The screenings will be offered on the big screen in the Cinéplex Odéon – Quartier latin (350, rue Émery). Festive evenings at the neighboring Espace Atmosphère round out the program.
The selection for this first edition gives pride of place to European creations (see box). This is not a competitive festival, but a prize will be awarded to the public’s favourite series.
The idea of a festival dedicated to quality serial television works, an imperial genre that is hyperpopular worldwide, is so simple and promising that one wonders why no one has had it before here. Montréal séries was born from discussions around a pétanque court in Rosemont between two neighbors, film and television producer Brigitte Janson and businessman and patron Christophe Chevreuil, two Quebecers of French origin who have been living here for decades.
“We were talking, we were a bit nostalgic for the World Film Festival, and we realized that there were no TV series festivals here, like Séries Mania in Lille and the Cannes International Series Festival,” explains M in an interview.me Janson: There was a festival in New York, but it hasn’t existed since 2018. We did a market study. We eat up series, we like them, and we said to ourselves that there was a place to take in North America, and we’re taking it. We also didn’t want Toronto to take over this project.
Mme Janson studied and practiced visual arts, worked in high fashion as a modeling agent, then as a television and film producer. She was an associate producer on the film The Bolduc and she is currently working on a series about the life of one of the Watergate “plumbers.” She is president of the new festival and is in charge of the artistic side.
Christophe Chevreuil has invested in real estate while collecting contemporary artists. He is the vice-president and treasurer of Montréal séries. Basically, he is the one who finances the event and allows it to be free. The event does not receive any subsidies at the moment.
“We’ll see the final budget after the fact,” he said. “I can handle it. I love art and culture. I’m a collector of paintings and sculptures. In fact, our public prize was sculpted by the artist Bénédicte Parmentier. Brigitte and I wanted to have fun. She’s 61, I’m 57. We decided to do something more fun. Frankly, we were fed up with our respective jobs. In my case, we always had to talk about money, money, money.”
Séries Mania, the major event of the series world created in Paris in 2010, transferred to Lille in 2018, serves as a model to follow. It now extends over eight days, receives series and their creators from all over the world, organizes a professional forum and manages a first school intended for the professions of series productions.
“We want to focus on quality over quantity,” says Brigitte Janson. “Next year, we want to organize master classes and meetings with artists and professionals. Within two years, we would also like to create a market that would become a meeting point in North America between professionals from here and those from the rest of the world. The ideal for us would be to install it at the neighboring Cinémathèque.”