MIRACLE WORKER
Festival du nouveau cinéma’s Claude Chamberlan counts his lucky stars after landing a sneak peek of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, but says his mid-sized event remains focused on ‘proximity, la gang, family’
“J’y travaille cher Claude. Je peux rien promettre mais je pousse.” EMAIL FROM DENIS VILLENEUVE TO CLAUDE CHAMBERLAN, AUG. 30, 3:28 P.M.
Festival du nouveau cinéma cofounder Claude Chamberlan was sitting in the yard of his Eastern Townships home overlooking Lac Brome, just under 48 hours after receiving the above message, when his cellphone rang.
The voice on the other end brought word of what he now refers to as “le miracle,” confirmation that the FNC had secured one of just two festival premières of the year’s most anticipated film: Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049.
Chamberlan remembers everything clearly, as if in a dream.
“It was 3 p.m., Sept. 1,” he said. “I got a call from (Villeneuve). He said, ‘Claude, it’s a deal!’ I couldn’t believe it. We talked a lot — it had been a while. Then he said, ‘Claude, now you’re going to be dealing with Alcon Entertainment, Sony Entertainment and, above all, Warner Brothers.’ So you can imagine the rest.”
The rest was a whole lot of dotted I’s and crossed T’s, the likes of which come with landing one of the only sneak peeks of a Hollywood sequel fans have waited 35 years for, and which has been painstakingly kept out of the public eye until the very last minute.
“Everybody wanted that film,” Chamberlan said. “All the festivals — Cannes, Venice, Toronto of course.
“It’s all because of Denis. We owe him everything. C’est grâce à lui. C’est un cadeau de Denis au festival, et un cadeau au public du Québec. He didn’t have to. And I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.”
Of course, not everyone in Quebec will get to see the film at Wednesday night’s invite-only screening, but that’s not the point. This is about bragging rights.
Blade Runner 2049 will have its world première Tuesday in Los Angeles. On Wednesday, it opens the 46th FNC and screens at the Zurich Film Festival, before hitting European (and select North American) theatres on Thursday and the rest of the world on Friday.
In other words, outside of the official L.A. launch, Montrealers will be among the first people anywhere to view the sci-fi blockbuster that could well propel their hometown boy into the ranks of the most sought-after filmmakers on the planet.
“C’est le plus grand coup dans l’histoire du festival,” Chamberlan said. This from a man who has lived through 45 editions of his beloved event — beloved by him, by Villeneuve and by successive generations of Quebec filmmakers and film buffs.
As the beleaguered Festival des films du monde (FFM) fades ever further into disrepair, the FNC is flying high, reinventing itself at every opportunity and enjoying the ride.
What gives the festival its je ne sais quoi? Chalk it up to a combination of elusive traits that define our city at its finest: style, grace, audacity, edge and effortless cool.
The FNC couldn’t care less about glamour and glitz, but will put everything on the line for a great film. This year’s edition boasts 167 features and 181 shorts from 68 countries, from Wednesday through Oct. 15.
The cream of the season’s festival crop can be found in the Incontournables section: from Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Square; to Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof’s A Man of Integrity, winner of Cannes’s Un certain regard prize; Greek avant-garde visionary Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Cannes winner, best screenplay); Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, starring Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, which screened in competition at Cannes; two by South Korea’s Hong Sang-Soo — Claire’s Camera, starring Isabelle Huppert, and Palme d’Or contender The Day After; Sean Baker’s American youth-on-the-brink portrait The Florida Project; Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Loveless; and John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky, starring the late Harry Dean Stanton.
More fest circuit favourites, of the up-and-comer variety, appear in the FNC’s International Competition, beginning with Léa Mysius’s French debut feature Ava (Cannes’s International Critics’ Week); Maryam Goormaghtigh’s deadpan French road movie Avant la fin de l’été (Cannes’s ACID sidebar); Shady Srour’s Tribeca pick Holy Air; two from Cannes’s Un certain regard selection — Russian director Kantemir Balagov’s Tesnota, and Western, from Germany’s Valeska Grisebach; two from Locarno — Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s Cocote and Gürcan Keltek’s Meteorlar; and Carla Simón’s Summer 1993, which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. entertaining zombie romp Les affamés, winner of best Canadian feature at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF); Denis Côté’s wry bodybuilding documentary Ta peau si lisse; Kim Nguyen’s Eye on Juliet; Iranian Montrealer Sadaf Foroughi’s Ava, winner of the International Federation of Film Critics’ Discovery prize at TIFF; Simon Lavoie’s La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, which earned a TIFF honourable mention; and Eisha Marjara’s genderbending comedy Venus.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
His irrepressible spirit and impish laugh have come to define the FNC, but unlike his FFM counterpart Serge Losique, Chamberlan feels no pressure to hold onto the reins.
He’s in the process of letting go, and will step down as co-director of programming after this year, handing over the artistic direction of his event to Philippe Gajan, a veteran of the FNC who worked on the short-film component for the better part of the past two decades.
“I’m going to stay on as programmer for special presentations,” Chamberlan said, “but mainly, I’m letting the team do its thing.”
He rattled off names of other programmers — “Julien (Fonfrède), Dan (Karolewicz), Sarah (El Ouazzani), the whole crew. The FNC is in safe hands.”
The move puts him in step with Toronto International Film Festival director Piers Handling, who announced he will leave his position at the end of next year.
“I understand why he’s quitting,” Chamberlan said. “Toronto has become such a (behemoth) — tabarnak! I would kill myself. Piers is a king of cinema; he knows cinema well. Now he’s obliged to play the game: big time, big money, tout le kit. You can only sustain that for a while.
“For me, mid-sized is fine. You see what happens to these other festivals; that doesn’t interest me. I prefer proximity, la gang, family. J’aime mieux ça. I’m not here to make money. Tsé, l’argent — who cares? All I know is what brings people together. You can’t put a price on that. Ça s’appelle well-being.”
Chamberlan’s current pet project is the launch of a new independent, art-house theatre that will bear the name of his beloved Cinéma Parallèle, the café-cinema he founded on St-Laurent Blvd. in 1967. It was the festival’s home base for more than three decades until it moved into Daniel Langlois’s Excentris complex, which closed its doors in 2016.
He’s still looking for the right venue, and spent a recent visit to New York touring new-school art-house theatres including Metrograph, Roxy and the renovated Quad Cinema. He also dropped in on pal Martin Scorsese, whom he hopes to recruit for a tête-à-tête discussion with French director Bertrand Tavernier at next year’s FNC.
“They’re both saviours of film,” Chamberlan said, “and good friends. Un français et un américain. I want to do things differently. C’est ça que je veux faire.”