On and Off the Beaten Path by Carole Bell Ford
Montreal Part II

Part II in a series on Montreal.

Festival des Films du Monde de Montreal/ World Film Festival

 By Carole Bell Ford

We love going to the World Film Festival for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives me and my husband Steve an excuse to be in Montreal.

We have no idea when we first started to attend on a regular basis but I recently dug out a T-shirt that says Festival des Film du Monde, 1986. Since we know that wasn’t our first time, we figure it must have been in the late 70s or early 80s.

The first World Film Festival was held in Montreal in 1976. As I wrote in my previous article about Montreal, we don’t remember going to see any films at that time although we were there for the Olympic Games. It probably was just a small, start-up effort then. But it has grown, over the past thirty years, to include venues all over the city and a choice of viewing more than 200 films.

To attend any film festival you have to have several qualifications, albeit some dubious ones. You have to be a little film obsessed or at least, an aficionado. Steve and I fit those particular criteria well. We rarely rent videos because we’ve usually seen whatever we wanted to see in the movie theater, although we do try to be reasonably selective; we don’t go to see everything. Lately, I’ve taken to writing lists, not to forget which good ones are around.

If you attend a film festival, you should be able to sit through multiple screenings daily. Nowadays, we can only manage two, but in times past we often would see three (which was our actual limit). Two films a day doesn’t seem like so much if you grew up, as we did, in the era of the double feature. Yes, youngsters, “in our day,” except for the first-run houses in Manhattan, movie theaters always showed double features along with at least one short (sometimes one of a series) and the news. We did have previews, which were then called “coming attractions” but, thankfully, didn’t have to sit through twenty minutes of them after having put up with commercials for local businesses and Coca Cola.

And, finally, to enjoy the Montreal film festival you have to like foreign films. Foreign films is what the Montreal festival is all about. It truly is a World Film Festival. Even when the film is disappointing, which I have to admit happens more often than I’d like, it’s almost always a glimpse into a different culture or place—some quite remote—which I’ve never visited. It’s interesting to see what a place like Burkina Faso looks like, through the ideas of an indigenous filmmaker. For us, it’s a vicarious travel experience.

The Montreal festival is certainly not in the category of the major European festivals held annually in Cannes, or Venice, or Berlin. And it’s also different from some of the other, more well-known film festivals closer to home such as the ones held annually in Toronto and New York because there rarely showcase films made by the large studios or their supposedly “independent” subsidiaries. In fact, we avoid seeing a film, when there is an occasional one of those, which we know is bound for U.S. distribution, since we’ll catch it when we’re back home.

The films shown during the Montreal festival are most often small, independently made films; many are from countries that don’t have a sophisticated film industry. These are the riskiest films to see, with regard to our Western film-going sensibilities. But usually the ones made in the most exotic places, although many do get shown in Europe and some have already been previewed there, are least likely to get distribution in the U.S. (Those, previewed elsewhere, are in the festival but are not in competition.)

The film festival has several categories. There are, first of all, the first screenings of films that have been selected for the competition. They are often introduced by the producer or director, usually accompanied by one or more of the actors, who will have a Q and A following the screening or at a scheduled press conference. The winners are chosen by a jury. The president of this year’s jury was the well-known American actress, Kathy Bates. But I have to say that after all these years I have still not figured out how the films are selected for competition, since we’ve seen some real duds in that category and excellent films which are not in competition. Films that have previously been shown elsewhere are in the category called Hors Concours, or out of the running.

And there are usually some other special categories: Canadian films, First-Features (by new directors and with its own jury,) student films. In addition, there usually are a few selections that pay homage to a particular actor or director, a mini-retrospective. This year they had a lot of documentaries; we saw two very good ones.

All told, we saw seventeen films. That’s a little below our usual number but we were seduced away from the films by some other goings-on (one was a wonderful production of The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde).

We didn’t see the film that won the competition, The Chinese Botanists Daughter, because the sub-titles were only in French. Usually they have both English and French subtitles but because of budget problems this year they didn’t always have the funds for both translations. And while we can get by, our French is not good enough to follow a complex story. We did go to see a very interesting Italian documentary—Marcello, Una Vita Dolce, about Mastroianni of course—with French titles because I got the tickets by mistake and were actually, and very pleasantly surprised at how good our comprehension was.

Of the films we saw, I’ll briefly describe some that we liked –or at least one of us liked—and which we hope will be distributed here in the States. If they are, I’ll put a notice on this website for those of you who might like to see them.

Here are the 8 films we liked best (not in the order of our preference).

Extraterrestrials—(French Canadian) This film, a “documentary”, opened the festival. The premise is that you are watching an instructional film made by aliens who captured some humans in order to study them. The voice-over narration describes the humans’ behavior in the way zoologists describe the behavior of a colony of baboons. The actual dialog is among the humans; both those in captivity and their mates, who were also being studied but in their natural habitat: Paris. A dark comedy.

Snow in the Wind—(Chinese) I liked this film better than Steve did. I agreed with him that the film needs a lot of editing. And the subtitles, often problematic with Chinese films, were awful. But it was visually stunning and some of the acting was quite excellent and moving. Shot in the northern mountains of China, it is the story of a projectionist, but the subtext is about how important film was to people in this remote part of country in the 1970s. Film brought the only images of the outside world the people of this community would see. A memorable scene: the people of the little village, bundled up in all the clothes they own and gathered outdoors in the freezing night, shuffling from one foot to another and blowing into their hands to keep warm as the snow swirls around, while on the makeshift screen is the film of a ballet company dancing Swan Lake.

The Night Before Finals—(Italian) You can imagine: Italian teenagers about to take their final exit exams from high school. A coming of age film, great fun.

Yippee—(U.S) A documentary by famed director, Paul Mazursky, about orthodox Hasidic Jews who make an annual pilgrimage to Uman, a town in Ukraine, during the high holy days. In 2005 Mazursky went along to film the 20,000 who were there: dancing, praying and rejoicing in the start of the new year. (Incidentally, Mazursky was there for a very interesting Q and A.)

Camarón—(Spanish) The fascinating and very well done biography of a man who was a legend in Spain for his Flamenco singing. Usually the singing accompanies Flamenco dancing, but Camarón was such a mesmerizing singer that he was a solo performer. We had a fairly lengthy one-on-one discussion about the film with the director following the screening. He remained in the lobby for this purpose, as many of the directors do who don’t hold formal Q and A’s. 

En Soap—(Danish) A quirky, complex and moving story of the relationship that develops between a woman and her new neighbor, a man who is well on his way to becoming a woman. He is a transsexual awaiting his final surgery.

What Means Motley? (Romanian, Irish) This hilarious film is based upon the true story of a dozen or so Romanians who wanted to emigrate, and of the Irishman who generates a plan for them to pose as a singing group scheduled to appear at a folk-music festival in Ireland. The fact that none of them can sing doesn’t deter any of them from finding a way to fool the authorities and pursuing their plan.

The Only One (Belgian) In Flemish, this little gem of a film is about an elderly man who, after living with his daughter and her family for some time following his wife’s death (an arrangement that none of them are happy with,) gets tutored in how to fend for himself and, consequently, reclaims the years that are left of his life.

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