Montreal Gazette

Second edition of the Hudson Festival of Canadian Film promises to be stellar

- BILL YOUNG Bill Young is a longtime Hudson resident. williamyou­ng@videotron.ca

Coming on March 2, the second edition of the profoundly successful Hudson Festival of Canadian Film.

Again this year, the Festival pays homage to those Canadian films — features and documentar­ies — it considers among the best of the past 12 months.

All are all sufficient­ly rich to tap the cinematic juices of even the most jaundiced filmgoer.

The River of My Dreams, a glorious glimpse into the life of Gordon Pinsent is on the list.

So too is Mean Dreams, the Cannes Film Festival favourite crafted by a duo from the West Island, and the Inuit film Maliglutit, director Zacharias Kunik’s take on the John Ford classic, The Searchers.

Xavier Dolan’s highly praised if controvers­ial It’s Only the End of the World is offered as a bonus film on Sunday Night.

The Festival opens with Ben’s Night: a tribute to Hudson’s Ben McKinnon and aspiring film makers.

But the hottest ticket might well be veteran director John Walker’s intensely personal Québec My Country Mon Pays, a challengin­g film that transcends that time and place many of us remember very well, a film described by one commentato­r as “brimming with love and longing.”

Following the screening

Walker will lead a discussion on the film’s many dimensions. It will be interestin­g.

Walker grew up in Quebec, the son of English-speaking parents whose roots in the province date back 250 years.

But that was then, before the 1960s and the beginnings of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution — those years when bombs were set off in mailboxes, a British diplomat was kidnapped and a Quebec Cabinet minister murdered, when suddenly we English-speakers became the enemy.

In the film Louise Pelletier, daughter of Gerard Pelletier, one of Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet ministers, asks, “Why didn’t they fight if Quebec was — and it was — their home?”

Well many did fight, in the only way they could. They fled. Upward of 300,000 Englishspe­akers headed down the 401 to Toronto, John Walker and his family included.

Even Festival director Clint Ward was caught up in that mix. “My Montreal years were the

happiest in my life” he recalls. “But as pressures mounted, I did what most did. I went to Toronto.”

When Walker’s father died in 2008, the family realized that even though he lived in Toronto for 30 years, his heart lay in Quebec. That was home: his burial would take place there.

As Walker told the Toronto Star’s Martin Knelman in April, this decision changed everything. “To me, the exodus was a story I wanted to tell.”

Home, they say, is where, when you get there, they have to take you in. Walker was about to put that adage to the test.

The result is a touchingly emotional film, joyful at times, both forgiving and unforgivin­g, and intensely personal.

There is no definitive ending to Quebec My Country Mon Pays. It’s left to the individual viewer to determine that for themselves.

In a coda summarizin­g the paradox that faces our Anglo community each day, Montrealer Christina Clark, manages in

the film, to capture our collective angst with unerring precision.

“Living here is wonderful,” she says.” I couldn’t think of living anywhere else ... On the other hand, I sometimes feel as though I’m not welcome, not wanted, and that, at 25, with whatever talents I may have, these are not something people would welcome me for with open arms ... so it’s sadness, ultimately.”

Distinguis­hed filmmaker Denys Arcand is more direct. “There is no relationsh­ip between French Canadians and English Canadians — to this day!” he exhorts, channellin­g the late Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan, whose novel Two Solitudes famously described Quebec’s linguist divide as “two solitudes in the infinite waste of loneliness under the sun.”

This is one film you don’t want to miss!

For informatio­n Google the Hudson Film Society web page and select Festival.

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada