Canadian Pics Shine and Provoke

Local production shared the limelight during Days 3-4 of the Montreal World Film Festival. Two of the four films in official competition, Hochelaga and Maëlstrom, were from promising homegrown filmmakers and they both grabbed the most headlines and popular enthusiasm in this early part of the week. The films couldn't be more different. Hochelaga is a sizzling first feature from director Michel Jetté who dares to penetrate Montreal's criminal biking underworld, where the number of gang killings have rivaled those of the Moscow mafia in in recent years.

Undoubtedly the kino event of the fall season in French-speaking Quebec, Hochelaga, despite its low budget weaknesses, is an ultra-realistic tour de force, with an often impenetrable, and heavily Anglicized, slang. Playing on this linguistic angle, always a hot button here, the producers have even printed a flyer containing a lexicon of over a hundred terms and expressions shouted in the film. (Hochelaga, incidentally, stands for Montreal's working class district where biker gangs control the drug traffic).

Maëlstrom, by contrast, is a film of allegory whose intensity burns in moments of silence, very much the kind of art film so craved for at a fest like Montreal's. Helmed by Montreal director Denis Villeneuve (Un 32 août sur la terre), the universality of the film's theme-about a woman experiencing emotional meltdown following a series of traumatic events-makes it probably a stronger candidate for world film fest exposure than its biking cousin.

Local biz also received a boost with the unveiling of a new distribution outfit, Les Films Seville, which is making quite a splash at the fest with five prestige Euro flicks, including the opener Le goût des autres and the Cannes-preemed Les Destinées sentimentales, a three-hour costumer which enchanted media and movie buffs alike on Monday night. At a time when even the distribution of so-called niche films in Canada is controlled by American-based companies (isn't everything global anyway?), Seville has long term plans of directly competing with the Yankees and acquiring North American and international distrib rights on some hot non-studio fare from anywhere on the planet.

With the Montreal fest's dogged determination to run upstream and showcase the kind of cinema increasingly pushed away from movie screens in North America, it was fitting for the Film Market, which runs concurrently with the festival, to hold a symposium on the theme of "Cultural Diversity and Market Globalization. Is There a Future for National Cinema?". Panelists included former Quinzaine des réalisateurs and current Sundance Festival toppers Pierre-Henri Deleau and Geoffrey Gilmore, both regulars visitors at the festival.

Judging from public reaction, so far, the future of national cinemas appears increasingly dependent on festivals such as Montreal's. Hard to believe, but two of the new Iranian films playing yesterday easily beat the sole Hollywood studio offering, Bait, at the fest box office! Who needs to rush to see a film which, good or bad, will be plastered all over America in two weeks? The two Iranian films were not exactly soft on the viewer, with the first words uttered in Daughters of the Sun a good 25 minutes into the film.

Sundance hit What's Cooking did prove a crowd pleaser, however, as well as Karlovy Vary winner The Big Animal and Danish modern-classical Lady of Hamre. On the world premiere front, Raoul Ruiz's lyrical Combat d'amour en songe (in competition), the edgy German-lingo Zoom (about a Romanian-born call girl), and the Iranian Legend of Love turned some heads. And, inevitably, the competition boasted its first certified turkey: Moon Fish, from Portugal.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Dominique Arel