Festivals: Montreal Nouveau
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: SCHIRKOA: IN LIES WE TRUST, Anonymous Dystopia to Queer Utopia
Authoritarian dystopian futures, as imagined by writers, artists, and filmmakers, often have familiar tropes, usually about the neutralization of individuality, the importance of conformity, and how it eventually becomes impossible to keep the brightness and individuality of the human spirit...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL
It's hard to imagine what any of us would do, if we were driving along a quite road and came across a dead body, let alone the body of a member of our family. For Shula (Susan Chardy), on her...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HUMAN HIBERNATION, Under a Cow's Eye
Like many Canadians (and others who live in a colder climate), I often dream - at least fleetingly - about hibernating for the winter, like our bear brethren. Sleeping away those colder months, and reawakening with the earth as it...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HYPERBOREANS, The Puppetry of Memory
Human memory is fallable, at least on an individual level; though as some cultures can tell you, a poor memory has also been of great service to larger groups of people who need to forget, or need others to forget,...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, FInding Truth & Joy Between the Pages
If only we could all be like Orlando, the character from Virginia Woolf's novel: go to sleep for a week to effect the great transformation likely all of us have desired at some point. In Orlando's case, it's a change...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: MARS EXPRESS, A Noir Mystery and a Posthuman Philosophical Journey
Why do we always assume that it is the robots who will be a danger to us? You could argue it's a fair assumption, as they will likely be physically stronger, and perhaps with brains able to make calculations and...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED, Comedic Discomfort in Millenial Ennui
While ennui and angst are common to many generations, I can imagine it could be much more accute among millenials - anything that might have been considered a 'normal' life gave up the ghost before they came of age. They're...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: CIELO ABIERTO, Slow Textures Reveal Quiet Truths
We often tend to think of the ravages of colonialismin terms of forests ravaged, animal populations decimated - but colonialism was built with stone. The cities, and especially the moments to white supremacy, came from the stone and hard labour...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: THE SIX SINGING WOMEN, Nature Bites Back
Many cultures have folklore about spirits who live in nature, as protectors of forests, rivers, animals, and really, anything on which humans might prey and inflict harm - such as what humans have sadly done for a long time. The...
Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: MANNVIRKI, Helping Nature & Art Reclaim Itself
Many of us who live in urban or semi-urban places likely know areas of our city or town where there are a lot of abandoned buildings - sometimes residential, often industrial. We can see small bits of nature reclaiming these...
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: EXTRANEOUS MATTER, Aliens Come In Strange Places
A friend of mine once wrote an essay for a university film course, discussing how it's often difficult for a viewer to fully comprehend a film from another culture; there are often too many nuances and contexts simply not understood....
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: LA CONTEMPLATION DU MYSTÈRE, The Hunter Becomes the Hunted
Our parents often have friends that we only vaguely know; rituals they kept that seems weird to us; and often, if we are estranged from them or separated by distance, a life that we cannot comprehend. Add into that a...
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: Folklore Dreams Get Peculiar in TZAREVNA SCALING
Many little girls (and boys, I'm sure) have dreamed of becoming a princess; or at least, dreamed themselves the child of royalty, thus giving them a life of leisure, parties, worship from the adoring public, and a pretty awesome wardrobe....
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: AFTER BLUE, Succumb to the Desiring Nightmare
Paradis Sale, the original french title of Bertrand Mandico's sophomore feature, translates as 'Dirty Paradise'. And this place isn't exactly a paradise, nor is it dirty. But it is most definitely strange and surreal, filled with intoxication and eroticism, and...
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: ZERIA, A Fractured Story of a Dying World
What are the stories that will be left for humanity, if (or really, when) there is a shift in how we live? Or where we are? What are the ideas, histories, feelings, we need to impart to the next generations,...
Montreal Nouveau 2021 Review: THE POWER OF THE DOG, Hidden Objects Betray Love & Weakness
In a landscape of rolling hills, few trees, and a beauty that comes harsh and stark, it can be a constant burden to hide: hide secrets, hide identity, hide desire, in a world that refuses to allow for sensitivity and...
The Great Festival Rebound of 2020: Let The Anarchists Speak
We are not at Sundance right now. However, we do have Anarchists who are covering the festival lineup. IFF Rotterdam started today and we won't be there either. But, we do have an Anarchist all raring to go and cover...
Montreal Nouveau 2020 Review: SAINT NARCISSE, Walk Through the Witchy Mirror
There are always at least two things you can count on with a Bruce LaBruce film: one, that you won't be able to predict where it will go, and two, that there will be a lot of sex. Both of...
Montreal Nouveau 2020 Review: THE BOOK OF VISION, Visual Beauty Hides A Flimsy Narrative
The study and treatment of ailments of the human body is certainly one of the most fascinating of histories; the way look back in shock on how illnesses were once treated (leeches, blood-letting), people of the future might one day...
Montreal Nouveau 2020 Review: RED MOON TIDE, We Are Left to the Witches and Monsters
In Galicia, where forests meat a rugged and dangerous coastline, Rubio has gone missing. The local village's resident diver, he would search for the bodies of those lost to the rough seas, or possible eaten by the monster that lurks...
