Dominique Dugas’s
Rendezvous du cinéma québécois takes film industry’s pulse.
It’s like throwing a birthday party for yourself. While Quebec cinema is being celebrated around the world, there’s no better place to fête the quality and diversity of our province’s annual film output than Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (RVCQ).
The festival, which kicked off its 31st edition Thursday night and continues through March 3, takes a comprehensive look back at virtually all the important movies made here over the past year and offers a handful of premières to lead us into the year ahead. More than 300 films will be shown, including 41 fiction features, 79 documentaries, 155 shorts and 23 student films.
From Kim Nguyen’s acclaimed child soldier saga Rebelle (up for an Oscar for best foreign-language film on Sunday night) to Xavier Dolan’s transgenderism odyssey Laurence Anyways (recently adopted by Gus Van Sant, who is co-producing the film’s U.S. release); via Bernard Émond’s existential modern family drama Tout ce que tu possèdes; Magnus Isacsson’s final documentary, Ma vie réelle, about disadvantaged youth in Montreal North; Yung Chang’s boxing doc China Heavyweight and taste travelogue The Fruit Hunters; Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Gaza thriller Inch’Allah (recent winner of the FIPRESCI Prize in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival); to Michael Dowse’s hit hockey comedy Goon — it’s all there.
“Everyone has talked about the crise in Quebec cinema,” said RVCQ director Dominique Dugas. “There’s no crise. It’s going well. It’s more like a crisis at the box office — people are not going to see (Quebec) films. But it’s very interesting to look at all the films released this year, at the quality of cinema in Quebec. And the Rendez-vous is the place to take the pulse of that cinema, in all its forms.”
While our independent films continued to garner attention at major festivals around the world, homemade blockbusters took a beating in Quebec in 2012. But even those films get a second chance at the RVCQ. Claude Desrosiers’s corruption epic L’Empire Bo$$é, Luc Dionne’s Mafia saga Omertà, Podz’s controversial wrongful conviction tale L’Affaire Dumont and Éric Tessier’s kids’ hockey pic Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’Hiver qui a changé ma vie are all on the agenda.
But so is Denis Côté’s experimental park safari documentary Bestiaire, Brigitte Poupart’s stunning dance doc Over My Dead Body (which screened at the MOMA in March), Ivan Grbovic’s unconventional coming-of-age story Roméo Onze and Federico Hidalgo’s quirky LatinAmerican immigrant lark L’Incrédule.
“Our approach is really to provide a retrospective of the year in film,” Dugas said, “a panorama of the highlights, but to also go into the margins of independent cinema.”
Further off the beaten track, the fest offers an array of documentaries, including Joe Balass’s gay nun tale Joie!; Yannick B. Gélinas’s From Montréal, on the city’s thriving bilingual indie music scene; Ben Addelman’s Kivalina v. Exxon, following an aboriginal town’s fight for survival; Shannon Walsh’s Johannesburg survey Jeppe on a Friday; Yanick Létourneau’s African rap odyssey Les États-Unis d’Afrique; Paule Baillargeon’s poetic self-portrait Trente tableaux; Paul Arcand’s teen drunkdriving wake-up call Dérapages; Nadine Gomez’s Le Horse Palace, about a holdout Griffintown stable; and Hugo Latulippe’s moving Alphée des étoiles, about his young daughter’s struggle to live with a rare disease.
The festival also boasts several notable premières, among which are Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Roche papier ciseaux, which opened the fest on Thursday (see review on this page); Rafaël Ouellet’s grad-night snapshot Finissant(e)s; Martin Laroche’s Les Manèges humains, in which a young filmmaker explores her troubled past as a child in Africa; and François Delisle’s closing film Le Météore (which just screened at the Berlin Film Festival), a sensorial look at the world of a prison inmate serving a 14-year sentence.
While the features draw the crowds, Dugas hopes they will lead people to discover the fest’s extensive range of shorts, packaged into convenient theme-driven programs with such headings as Animation, Coup de poing, Radical, Expérimental, Sombres Fantaisies and Different View.
Nighttime is party time at the RVCQ, with daily events at the Cinémathèque québécoise meant to merge film, music and schmoozing. Dolan hosts the not-to-bemissed shindig Xavier Anyways on Saturday at 11 p.m., featuring a performance by a secret (but well-known) Montreal rock band. Wednesday is 10 ans sous micro_ scope!, a bash thrown by the red-hot production company (Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar, Inch’Allah). And March 1 is Les États-Unis d’Afrique: Remix, with beats by Poirier and MC Boogat.
The state of the Quebec film industry will be dissected at two 5-à-7 panels at the Cinémathèque québécoise: Qu’est-ce qu’un film québécois rentable? (What Is a Profitable Quebec Film?) on Monday, and Rayonnement international du cinéma québécois (International Appeal of Quebec Cinema) on Wednesday.
“It’s part of a series of activities that put (Quebec) productions in perspective,” Dugas said. “We’re thinking about our cinema. … It’s a real festival that resembles no other festival in Montreal, dedicated to our cinématographie nationale.”