The 2022 Festival du Nouveau Cinéma put on a spotlight on eclectic and avant grade films still seeking international distribution, like Coma, The Maiden, and Continental Drift (South).
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One of my favourite pandemic discoveries, from the time when festivals were all virtual, is Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. Founded in 1971 as a place to showcase films without distribution, it’s been around longer than the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Outside of Quebec and the francophone world, it’s been one of Canada’s best kept secrets. Now that TIFF has abdicated its role as the festival of festivals, Nouveau Cinéma has emerged as the cooler, hipper place to discover exciting, quirky, and avant garde films — films TIFF increasingly doesn’t even program. The focus of the festival is not world premieres but curation. It’s a great ground zero if you’re looking for off-the-beaten path films that might have been overlooked by more populist film festivals.
Like most fall festivals, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma screens many crowd-pleasing hits from previous festivals. Its “Essentials” program has included, in recent years, The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Ahed’s Knee (2021). This year featured Sarah Polley’s ghastly Women Talking (stay tuned for our podcast!) to Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave. Unlike most festivals though, these “Essentials” program also included more eclectic, even avant garde, festival darlings. “Essentials” also screened Bertrand Bonello’s deeply weird pandemic-mind film Coma and Jerzy Smolikowski’s fantastic donkey odyssey Eo.
The boon of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma’s virtual platform in 2020-2021
In 2020 and 2021, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma’s virtual platform provided low friction access to films outside my comfort zone. I didn’t have to obtain a ticket, leave the house, queue, or suffer through people coughing on me. If a film wasn’t for me, I could start and stop it without running around town. I watched films that I never would have sought out at a big in-person festival like TIFF. There, buzzy films take up all the oxygen. When cramming in 30+ films in 10 days, it’s hard to grapple with slow or experimental cinema. But some of those films might end up being your favourites.
Programming crowdpleaser and the more avant grade
Nouveau Cinéma’s programming is wonderfully rare. It’s a pretty fifty-fifty split between accessible films and more eclectic films that will broaden your horizons. The festival gives you the space, selection, and encouragement to try out new forms. In 2021, I tasted a broad cross-section of the festival. I discovered the great creative nonfiction film Wood and Water (previously programmed at the Berlinale). I was floored by the animation in the migration narrative The Crossing (previously at Annecy alongside Flee). Last year also included Hong Sangsoo’s Berlinale screenplay winner Introduction, and Canadian debut feature The Noise of Engines. None of these films screened at TIFF. Wood and Water is our third favourite film of 2022 so far. It’s also the only one of these films to have received both theatrical and streaming distribution to date.
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Berlinale highlights at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2022
In 2022, I saw a lot of the Berlinale titles in this year’s Nouveau Cinéma program at the Berlinale itself. These were films I definitely would never have sought out in the past. Bonello’s Coma, which I struggled to get through in February, has been impossible to get out of my mind since. It’s partly a look inside the imagined mind of Bonello’s teenage daughter during lockdown. But it includes bizarre sequences like a social media influencer sticking her hand in a blender on YouTube and a stop-motion animated Barbie and Ken doll arguing about infidelity. At the Berlinale, I also saw the provocative award-winning documentary Mutzenbacher, which observes men reading and thinking about early twentieth century pornography. Neither film has picked up a distributor to date.
The new festival of festivals
My Nouveau Cinéma experience this year thus involved fewer new discoveries than past years. But the festival screened so many highlights of the year. My favourite film out of Cannes (and #2 out of TIFF), Plan 75, screened in Nouveau Cinéma’s Panorama. It’s about a government program coercing elderly people into euthanising themselves if they can no longer afford to live, . This Japanese dystopian film feels like a harrowing warning for Canada’s future under MAiD. Plan 75 had yet to secure a distributor when it was programmed. It will now be released by KimStim. I also loved Nouveau Cinéma’s opening film, Falcon Lake, an impressive debut from Charlotte Le Bon at Cannes.
Montreal local Théodore Pellerin’s latest project, Continental Drift (South), had its Canadian premiere at Nouveau Cinéma. Overlooked by many critics at Cannes, it was actually one of my favourite films of the festival and the year. (There’s a quote from my review in the festival’s program notes.) Continental Drift is a satire about hypocrisies and failures of empathy both big and small. Seventh Row favourite Pellerin does his best work since Genèse. Continental Drift is still seeking distribution in Canada and abroad. I have high hopes that its local talent will eventually attract a Quebec distributor.
A festival that encourages careful viewing of more eclectic titles
Watching 50+ films at TIFF, I didn’t have the headspace I needed (and that Nouveau Cinéma afforded) to carefully watch Graham Foy’s elegiac and elliptical The Maiden about teenage loss and loneliness in suburban Alberta. After picking up awards at Venice and critical acclaim at TIFF, I had overly high expectations for The Maiden. But The Maiden is still an impressive debut. Even with MDFF’s backing, it’s unlikely to have a wide theatrical release, and is thus exactly what I look to festivals for.
I was less impressed with the films at Nouveau Cinéma which had previously won awards at other festivals, but were missing from the TIFF lineup. While Carla Simón’s debut feature, Summer 1993, heralded her as a major talent, her Berlinale Golden Bear winner, Alcarràs, disappointed. Overlong and didactic, Simón’s good intentions get lost within the film’s overly schematic approach.
The Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita is an extremely well made and empathetic film. It’s about Black African illegal immigrants in Belgium who face exploitation and an unforgiving refugee system, which prevents them from building a new life. A decade ago, I’d have championed it without reservations. But Canadian immigrant films like Coyote and So Much Tenderness, made by immigrants with lived in experience, were full of the specificity that Tori and Lokita lacked. Nouveau Cinéma programmed all three films.
The loss of the virtual platform in 2022
The biggest loss, for those of us outside of Montreal, from the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma’s return to in-person screenings, was its restoration and retrospective programs. At most festivals, these are automatic skips for me, because I figure I’ll be able to see them at some later date in the nearish future at a cinematheque. But in 2020 and 2021, the restorations were major highlights of my Nouveau Cinéma experience.
During its two virtual years, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma gave me a chance to watch impossible-to-find Canadian classics in 4K — some of which still haven’t become available in theatres or on VOD/Blu-ray. In 2020, I caught up with Les ordres, a Cannes-anointed docu-fiction film about life under the War Measures Act in 1970s Montreal. In 2021, I saw a gorgeous restoration of Phillipe Falardeau’s first feature film, The Left-Hand Side of the Fridge. This 2000 mockumentary is about an unemployed engineer who can’t find a job he likes, while wading through unemployment government hell, felt eerily of the moment. Telefilm Canada restored the film in 2021, but has still yet to see a theatrical, VOD, or physical media release a year out.
Don’t miss out on the best films on the fall film festival circuit
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Keep an eye on the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma’s programming, wherever you are
Three years into attending the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, I still think it’s a gift to film lovers. For those two special virtual years, Nouveau Cinéma gave me, and punters across Canada, an opportunity to catch up with films like this that would have otherwise disappeared. I’m sad that the only way to experience it now is to either travel to or live in Montreal, risking maskless flights, trains, and screenings. The festival’s continued focus on films seeking distribution is a boon for audiences. Unlike a festival like TIFF, these films are curated with cinephile audiences at top of mind, rather than to boost the festival’s marketplace reputation.
Even if getting to Montreal is an impossibility for you, I still recommend keeping an eye on the programming at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. When the films it selects come your way, jump at the chance to see them. In the meantime, seek out what you can find from years’ past. This team knows what it’s doing.
You may also be interested in our other film festival pieces featuring other discoveries like The Maiden and Coma…
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