For a city that has a film festival nearly every month of the year, it’s not easy to make a strong impression on cinema-goers. But for the 41st year in a row, the Festival du Nouveau Cinema has jam-packed its 11-day schedule with an exciting array of world premieres, low-budget, epic, animated and long-lost obscure cinematic fantasies including features, shorts, international films, documentaries, installations, and interactive performances.
Besides being the first festival to showcase a movie shot on video on the big screen, what makes this festival unique is its comprehensiveness and dedication to showcasing new and old and international films from a variety of countries, often well before their official release dates. The varied nature of the selections is astonishing, as you can choose from a number of long-lost rare vintage classics or as-yet unreleased avant-garde future classics on the big screen.
Notable selections from this year’s edition include: Life of Pi, a story of a boy and a Bengal tiger lost at sea, showing on October 20th a month before its November 23rd release date, directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, an intertwining of two inspiring chaotic stories: the independence of India and its subsequent bloody partition, and a poor boy with telepathic gifts, who is switched at birth with the child of a wealthy family, and La Revanche Du Tango; and, a world premiere of a film about the ‘second golden age of Tango’ happening now in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then there is Anna, a lost 1972 film shot on video about a pregnant, homeless 16-year-old, her boyfriend and a loose entourage of hippies and hangers-on in and around Rome’s Piazza Navona. In total: 288 films from 52 countries – including 41 world premieres, 4 international premieres, 66 North-American premieres and 39 Canadian premieres, the cream of local and international cinema, have been selected for this veritable orgy of films.
Life of Pi. A boy and a tiger lost at sea.