Festival du Nouveau Cinema ‘08 Preview

Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema celebrates it’s 37th year as one of the city’s premiere film festivals. It’s success has been due to great organization, original and modern advertising as well as its policy of allowing all of the latest films, regardless of whether or not they have played at previous festivals around the world. So while the Montreal World Film Festival is more concerned with being the first to premiere films, the FNC places this importance secondary to showing the latest great films. Thus, not only are you more likely to hit a higher quality film, but much of what is shown is known beforehand. This year’s festival is no exception, showing some of the critically acclaimed Cannes hits and others. The festival opens with short film, Next Floor and feature-length film A Sentimental Capitalism (Un capitalisme sentimentale) - both Quebecois premieres. It closes with the Cannes festival winner, The Class (Entre les murs).

The first section includes 19 films that vie for the grand prize of the FNC, the Louvre d’or. This includes first and second features from international directors. Of particular note are the variety of films that won either the Camera d’Or or Un Certain Regard jury prizes at the Cannes film festival. These include Russia’s Everybody Dies But Me (Vse umrut, a ya ostanus), USA’s Afterschool, the UK & Ireland’s Hunger, Kazakhstan’s Tulpan, & Israel’s Waltz with Bashir. Two Canadian films included in the category are A l’Ouest de Pluton about adolescent skateboarding culture, and Down to the Dirt about an alcoholic man from Newfoundland.

The Special Presentation films include critically acclaimed films and others made by known worldwide directors. These include Terrence Davies (Of Time and the City), Wim Wenders (Palermo Shooting), Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married), John Boorman (The Tiger’s Tail), Atom Egoyan (Adoration), and Deepa Mehta (Heaven on Earth). Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth & Wisdom, is also being shown in this category. The third category of films includes some of the last year’s best cinema by lesser known names: films like Delta, Gomorra, Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen), Man on Wire, Must Read After My Death, Synecdoche, New York, & Wendy and Lucy.

FNC’08 doesn’t end with just some of the hottest titles of the last year, but continues with other categories for all varieties of films. The Focus section includes mostly new Quebec and Canadian cinema, while Focus Temps Zero shows Fantasia-like cult films. There are numerous short film compilations, tributes, retrospectives, encounters, children’s film compilations (known as P’tits loups) and special events to please any film enthusiast or casual moviegoer.

The festival runs from October 8th to 19th. A full schedule of events can be found on the official website.