cinemania.
there is this really great, cosy film festival going on in montreal right now. it is called the cinemania film festival and it is a francophone film festival, meaning that all the films come from french-speaking countries … france, algeria, quebec, belgium, and all the others … all films are shown with english subtitles, which was a startling idea in montreal when this festival started 13 years ago.
it would be a long story to explain, but … although montreal is a bilingual town (english and french), there still are (and used to be many more) people who don’t speak very good french. so … this festival was a way to bring those people, and anyone else who was interested, out to see great films (that happen to be french) … films that they won’t see anywhere else. so today, it is a place where angolophone, francophones and allophones (people with any other language as their ‘mother tongue’) get together to see great films.
we went and saw les cartouches gauloises last night (’summer of ‘62′ is the english title), and it was incredible. it is about the end of france’s occupation of algeria … but seen through the eyes of boys. what a beautiful, complex film. apparently, it is semi-autobiographical, and the film-maker who made this film did it as a way to talk about, and explore, those incredibly traumatic … as well as the incredibly beautiful and joyful … events he lived as a kid … but which nobody ever talked about, because everyone lived through all the same madness at the same time.
the film contains some very troubling scenes, but it is all couched within the ’stand by me’ / huckleberry fin romanticism that accompanies all young people as they grow, explore, play and learn.
… a really, really great film.
… oh, and the other great thing about this festival is that it has moved to the cinema imperial in recent years, and this theatre makes me happy! there is nothing like seeing great cinema in a great theatre.
gotta love good art,
c.
