Festival du nouveau cinéma unveils opening and closing films for its 40th edition!

The entire Montreal film milieu might be wholly wrapped up in TIFF-related news this week, but there’s another festival – one that’s closer to home and, with all the gooey schmaltz I can muster, to our hearts – that will be celebrating its 40th anniversary from October 12 to 23. The big blowout concerns Festival du nouveau cinéma and its beloved she-wolf mascot, of course!

Still from Amos Gitaï's Alila

It’s the longest running festival in the country (take that, TIFF and FFM!) and the FNC team has just started rolling out program announcements to whet our appetites. For one, master Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï (Kippour, Alila, News From Home), who’s never shied away from sobering reflections on identity and exile, memory and history, will fly in for a special career retrospective (“Amos Gitaï – Architectures de l’identité”), presented in tandem with the Cinémathèque québécoise. The program looks back on more than 30 years’ worth of films, from his very first documentaries in the early ‘80s to his most recent features. Gitaï will also give a master class and present TRACES, a video installation featuring excerpts from previous films, including the affecting Lullaby to my Father, a tribute to his Bauhaus architect dad, who was arrested and tried by the Nazis in 1933.

La Guerre est déclarée [Bande Annonce] from B.O. LA GUERRE EST DECLAREE on Vimeo.

The FNC has also just revealed its picks for opening and closing films. The opener, Valérie Donzelli’s La guerre est déclarée, was released yesterday in France, and has struck a rare near-unanimous chord in a country where critics are known for being seriously ruthless. The low-budget feature, praised during Cannes’ 50th Critics’ Week, tells the story of Roméo and Juliette, two young, gorgeous Parisians who must contend with the sudden news that their young child has developed a brain tumour. The actors, real-life couple Donzelli (La Reine des pommes) and Jérémie Elkaïm (Presque rien, Le Bureau) are also respectively director and co-screenwriter, as they tap into the very real pain they experienced as they fought alongside their son Gabriel, afflicted by cancer. It’s the kind of synopsis that toys dangerously close to a Hallmark movie of the week storyline with an overdose of icky pathos, but it apparently makes powerful use of slow-mos, elements derived from comedy musicals (!) and strikes the right tonal balance between emotion and realism. That, plus the French press is touting it as the possible sleeper hit of the year. Donzelli and Elkaïm will ride into town to present the film at Cinéma Impérial. Check out the trailer above, boasting a top-notch score (that song at the end is Peter Von Poehl’s "The Bell Tolls Five", in case you were wondering.)

The FNC will cap off its 40th anniversary edition with the best Canadian film I’ve had the pleasure of screening so far this year, Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar. Some have already described it as Incendies meets The Class, which I think is perfectly fitting. Adapted from Evelyne de la Chenelière’s one-character play, Falardeau (whose excellent previous features La moitié gauche du frigo and Congorama have been shown at the festival) tells the story of Algerian immigrant Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), who takes over a Montreal grade-school classroom after the death of a teacher. Fantastic performances by Fellag, Danielle Proulx and Brigitte Poupart anchor an unaffected drama that hits all the right notes, from questioning the merits of honesty to confronting the loss of childhood innocence head-on. (More on the film in October!) After winning two prizes at the Locarno Film Fest – namely the Audience Award, always a harbinger of good things to come – Monsieur Lazhar could quickly position itself as the frontrunner for Canada’s entry in the Oscar's Best Foreign Film category.