FIFA 2016: Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti, Sculptor of the Gaze

Film by Charles De Lartigue

France | English | subtitled French | 2016 | 52 min

WORLD PREMIERE

At an auction in London in 2010, Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Walking Man was sold for 68 million pounds, which represents 104 million dollars. This was a world record, the largest sum of money ever paid for a single sculpture.

In order to better understand this phenomenal event, and the tremendous power that Giacometti's works have on art lovers, the film guides the spectator through the artist's life, and also through his artistic journey and creative processes. There are many photographs shown from his life, as well as short filmed interviews in which Giacometti comments on how he works. His artistic thoughts and ideas, expressed both on and off camera, are also revealed.

The film brings Giacometti to life, exposing his way of seeing people and the world around him. It brings into focus how individual is his creative journey, how unique are his perceptions which he moulds into his sculptures or portrays in his drawings and painting, thus showing to the world what he sees. 

Official Synopses:

"A journey into the life and works of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), who revolutionized 20th century sculpture. It is Giacometti himself who guides us with his gravelly voice and true Italian flair. His first experiments with reduction, around the age of 18, set the path for research that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Along the way, he flirted with the various currents of the time—Cubism, Negro art, Abstraction and Surrealism—before defining his own vision, which beginning in 1946 came to full fruition."

Charles De Lartigue

A writer, director and producer, Charles de Lartigue studied law and art history before turning to filmmaking.
Filmography | Les peintres et la Provence (1995-1996), série ; Yachting, a 150 year tradition? ; From Flandres to Europe ; Euralille ; La Turbine tertiaire ; Aurélie Nemours, le silence de la peinture ; Gottfried Honegger, l’art concret ; America’s Cup, The Quest for Excellence.

Production Team:

Screenplay Charles De Lartigue
Cinematography Olivier Mauguy, Volker Noack
Sound Jean-Claude Leita
Editing Arthur Guibert, Nina Lucia
Music Ian Freebairn-Smith
Narration Ian Freebairn-Smith
Participation Alberto Giacometti
Artists Alberto Giacometti
Producer Charles De Lartigue
Production ANGLE LLC
Distribution ANGLE LLC


For more information and film scheduling, visit the Art FIFA website.

Film Screenings:

Saturday March 12 | 3:00 PM | Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal - Auditorium Maxwell-Cummings

Friday March 18 | 7:30 PM | Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal - Auditorium Maxwell-Cummings 

FILM TRAILER

FIFA 2016: Galleria Borghese

Museo Italia – Galleria Borghese

Film by Mimma Nocelli

Italy | Italian | subtitled English | 2015 | 50 min | documentary

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

The film introduces to the viewers the magnificent Villa Borghese, the ancestral house of the noble Roman family Borghese. The Villa, along with its entire art collection, and together with all the grounds and gardens, was sold to the State of Italy in 1901 by the Borghese heirs for 3.6 million liras. This was indeed a very generous transaction on the part of the Borghese family, especially when one considers that at the same time Baron Rothschild was offering to buy only one of many paintings housed in the Villa for 4 million liras.

The Villa was commissioned by Scipione Borghese (1577-1633), who was a Cardinal and a nephew of Pope Paul V. It was intended to be a summer residence at the edge of Rome, and also a a party villa. It was build by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, but Cardinal Scipione Borghese developed sketches for it by himself.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese was patron of arts. He was an avid art collector with a great taste, vast art knowledge, and he housed all his art acquisitions at his lavish Villa Borghese. Cardinal Scipione Borghese was also the patron of the painter Caravaggio and the sculptor Bernini. The works of these two artists are shown and discussed at length in the film.

The camera shots are almost never still. The camera moves from the gardens inside the Villa, and then from one room to the next, exposing the interior splendour of the Villa and the works of art inside it. The shooting angle is moving constantly, showing the works of art from various perspectives, and zooming in on various details in a rapid succession. 

Official Synopses:

"The most beautiful private collection in the world” is how Canova described Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s collection at the turn of the 17th century. A nephew of Pope Paul V, Scipione built the Villa Borghese in a large park just outside the walls of Rome to house this exceptional collection, which ranged from ancient works to contemporary pieces by such masters as Caravaggio and Bernini. Thus arose the modern concept of the collector: curious, refined in taste, quick to identify quality and the spirit of the time."

Mimma Nocelli

After studying architecture in Rome, Mimma Nocellia began directing programs, concert recordings, music videos and documentaries for Italian television.

Filmography | Viva Africa, série, 15 épisodes ; Amerindia, série, 15 épisoes ; Poiesis, série, 5 épisodes ; Tutti in scena ; Donne al bibio ; Une notte con Zeus.

Production Team:

Screenplay Antonio Paolucci
Artists Scipione Borghese, Le Caravage, Le Bernin
Producer Pasquale D'Alessandro
Production RAI 5

For more information and film scheduling, visit the Art FIFA website.

Film Screenings:

Saturday March 12 | 12:30 PM | Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal - Auditorium Maxwell-Cummings.

Friday March 18 | 10:30 AM | Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal - Auditorium Maxwell-Cummings 

FILM TRAILER

EARLY WINTER - PREMIÈRES NEIGES

DIRECTED BY MICHAEL ROWE

2015 / AUSTRALIA, QUÉBEC/CANADA | 96 minutes

Original version in English, Subtitled in French

DIRECTOR: Michael Rowe

SCREENPLAY: Michael Rowe

CAST: Suzanne  Clément, Paul Doucet, Micheline Lanctôt, Lise Martin

                

This film was the winner of the Jury Prize Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori), following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2015. The film was also screened in North American premiere at the 44th Festival of New Cinema in Montreal in October 2015 as well as at the festivals of Rouyn-Noranda, Melbourne, Brisbane, Halifax and Kerala. The film was released in France on January 6 and it will screen in Australia in March. It will be screened in Montreal starting January 29, 2015.

David, in his fourties, is leading a routine life with his wife Maya and their two children. To fill his wife of the latest gadgets, he works alone day and night as a janitor in a nursing home. But then he begins to suspect that Maya  is unfaithful, his whole life that is put to test, the past threatens to overtake the present.

Film's Official Synopsis

"David, 45, lives in Montreal with his wife, Maya, a housewife of Russian extraction who only speaks English, and their two young sons. Working the night shift in a nursing home, David copes as best he can with his miserable life by scouring thrift shops in search of things to repair, and by taking antidepressants. His past haunts him, and invades the present brutally when he learns that Maya is planning to attend a design fair where she will surely see Alexander, her lover from six years ago. With this final instalment in his painful trilogy about solitude, preceded by Leap Year (Camera d’or and Louve d’or, 2010) and The Well, Mexican filmmaker Michael Rowe has made a family drama (co-produced in Canada) of impressive rigour, using minimalist, patient and empathetic sequence shots to observe the slow disintegration of a couple folded in on itself, under bright yet gloomy and often stifling lighting designed by Nicolas Canniccioni. Suzanne Clément plays Maya with strikingly icy charisma, while Paul Doucet impresses with his portrayal of a once rock-solid man cracking up before our eyes."

 Film Trailer

Fatima - film

FATIMA

  

     Directior :  Philippe Faucon

     Actors : Zita Hanrot, Soria Zeroual, Kenza Noah Aïche

     Genre : Drame

     Script : Philippe Faucon

     Music : Robert-Marcel Lepage

     Country : France, Canada

     Released : 2015

     Duration: 89 min.

     Language : Arabic, French

    Festival : Festival de Cannes 2015

The film version I watched had no English subtitles.

This film is based on the writings by Fatima Elayoubi: Prière à la lune and Enfin, je peux marcher seule. The themes in those two works are loosely adopted for the film.
  

The film is about difficulty of the immigration, about the place allotted to the female immigrants from North Africa who are not well educated and who do not speak French even after a considerable time living in France, and the difficulty of raising children alone in a new culture in which the children are very quickly immersed.

Fatima lives on her own with two daughters whom she has to support, the 15 year old Souad, a teenager in revolt, and 18 year old Nesrine, who is starting a medical school. Fatima speaks French poorly and is constantly preoccupied with raising her daughters and the frustration by the daily interactions with them. They are her pride and joy, but they are also a constant source of worry. To ensure the best possible future for them, she works long hours as a cleaning woman. One day, she takes a fall on the stairs. On leave, Fatima begins to write to her daughters in Arabic what she has never been able to express to them in French.

The film is basically about the strength of Fatima's character and the difficulty of integrating into a new society.

FILM'S TRAILER

Cinemania 2015 Awards

CINEMANIA

November  5 - 15, 2015

CINEMANIA’s 21st edition of French films with English subtitles  ended on Sunday evening, November 15, 2015.

This year’s annual Montreal's film festival enjoyed a record 27% increase in attendance. It greatly surpassed all the expectations.

GRAND PRIX MEL HOPPENHEIM

The main CINEMANIA prize that has been awarded since 1998:

THE SENSE OF WONDER - LE GOUT DES MERVEILLES

Eric Besnard’s LE GOUT DES MERVEILLES carried off the Grand Prix Mel Hoppenheim. This very moving film follows the life of a young widow, Louise, coping as a single mother raising two children on a pear-farm in France’s Drome region. One evening on her way back from market she collides with a young man on a country road – he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a somewhat milder form of autism. His intelligence and his innate sense of curiosity about the wonders of the world forever change Louise’s life and that of her children. It’s a wonderful film, a very different romantic comedy featuring incredible chemistry between the two leads, Virginie Efira and Benjamin Lavernhe.

TFO Prix du Public for Best First Feature Film

JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA - VOYAGE EN CHINE

  

There were seven films eligible to compete for the TFO Prix du Public, and Zoltan Mayer’s VOYAGE EN CHINE was chosen by CINEMANIA’s audience as the favourite. The film, starring the talented Belgian actress Yolande Moreau, enjoyed it’s North American premiere at the Festival. Moreau movingly portrays a mother who travels to China to recuperate her son’s body, the result of a fatal motorcycle accident. She’s suddenly plunged into a foreign culture that’s completely strange to her and she gradually realizes that her sad voyage is becoming a journey of self-discovery, a reinvigoration of her own life despite her grieving.

A MOST SUCCESSFUL 21st EDITION!

Selecting the best films from such prestigious festivals as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Angouleme and Toronto, CINEMANIA 2015 programmed 44 films of which 40 were premieres, in addition to 3 retrospective films and 3 documentaries.

CINEMANIA’s stage at the Imperial Cinema was graced this year by guest of honour, actress Francoise Fabian; producer and actress, Julie Gayet; director Phillipe Le Guay; actors Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Ariane Ascaride, and Syrus Shahidi; filmmakers Guillaume and Stephane Malandrin; director and actor Mathieu Busson; and producers Dominique Besnehard and Tarek Lakhdar-Hamina.  All presented their films and gave generously of their time in engaging with CINEMANIA’s audiences.

The 22nd edition of CINEMANIA will take place from Thursday, November 3rd to November 13th, 2016.

For more information about the festival, viisit the CINEMANIA website.

RIDM 2015: Manoir

MANOR  - MANOIR
By MARTIN FOURNIER and PIER-LUC LATULIPPE

WORLD PREMIERE  -  REPORT ON QUEBEC 

2015 / Colour/ Canada - Quebec / 83 min. / French with English subtitles

The film was given the MAGNUS ISACSSON AWARD's  Special Mention at RIDM's Awards Ceremony. 

This films throws a light on some social issues mentally ill and disadvantaged people have to face in our modern society in Quebec. It posses the questions whether they receive an appropriate care and are provided with pleasant and stimulating, professionally ran environments, in order for them to feel as worthy and even active members of the community, as they can still play a valuable role despite there health and emotional difficulties. Just participating in this films proves that point. By telling us about themselves helps us to connect to our own humanity, and also to our caring for others.

In this film you meet some interesting, unusual people. You see how they care about each other, how they help each other in a rather difficult situation of being dislodged from what was their home for a long time. Moving is a very stressful event for anybody. But if you are ill and are not sure where you are going to go, where you will move, that must be even so much more stressful.

Watch the film and see how you feel about the people, your reactions to their situation. Look closer at those feelings as what they might tell you about yourself. 

Film's Official Synopsis

 “Whether mentally ill or caught in the grip of addiction, Michel, Paul, Johnny, Philippe, Nathalie and Gilles get by without any real care in Manoir Gaulin, a manor in name only. Looking like an abandoned motel, the private facility near downtown Saint-Hyacinthe, is a place steeped in misery. When a businessman announced plans to buy it, Martin Fournier (a member of the Amerika Orkestra collective, which made the stunning Daytona) and Pier-Luc Latulippe went inside to chronicle the difficult transition, resulting in a luminous, brilliantly directed film of great beauty and sadness, attentive to and respectful of its subjects’ distress.”

Presented in collaboration with the CSN and Post-Moderne

COUNTRY : QUEBEC
YEAR : 2015
LANGUAGE : FRENCH
SUBTITLES : ENGLISH
RUNTIME : 83 MIN
PRODUCTION : PATRICIA BERGERON, MARTIN FOURNIER, PIER-LUC LATULIPPE
CINEMATOGRAPHY : OLIVIER TÉTRAULT
EDITING : JF LORD
SOUND : MARTIN ALLARD

CONTACT
PIER-LUC LATULIPPE
PL.LATULIP@GMAIL.COM

 

MARTIN FOURNIER

FILMOGRAPHY
DAYTONA (2004)

 

PIER-LUC LATULIPPE

FILMOGRAPHY
PREMIER LONG MÉTRAGE - FIRST FEATURE

For more information about the RIDM documentary film festival visit the RIDM website.

RIDM 2015: Je suis le peuple

JE SUIS LE PEUPLE  - I AM THE PEOPLE

by ANNA ROUSSILLON

QUEBEC PREMIERE -INTERNATIONAL FEATURE COMPETITION

2014 / Colour / France / 111 min. / Arabic with French and English subtitles

This film has won the BEST EDITING IN AN INTERNATIONAL FEATURE Award which was given to the film's editors Saskia Berthod and Chantal Piquet. It was recognized that Je suis le peuple by Anna Roussillon, was  “an elegant and seamlessly structured chronicle of a revolution that weaves the local and the national as lived and seen by an unforgettable family in a province far from Tahrir Square.”

The film deals with a Egypt's recent history of about three year duration when Egypt saw in succession three different presidents at the helm of the country. The events at the Tahrir Square that deposited Hosni Mubarak from his presidential post and brought him to jail, began just a day after Anna Roussillon leaves Egypt at the end of the first segment of her film. 

The director befriends an Egyptian family who lives in a village outside of Luxor. The head of the family Farraj, Anna's principal friend, is the focus of her film. You can see him in the very top photo in this article, on the right. He is advanced in age but keeps working in the fields and a bit later establishes an additional wheat milling enterprise. One thing I failed to catch properly was his relationship to two women in the film. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up with the film's images and miss a couple of final words in subtitles. At first I thought the very first woman at the beginning of the film was his wife. But then she states later she is too old to have children, yet at the same time he is surrounded by his very young kids. Then another woman is said to be pregnant with his child. I even though he had two wives, as Muslims can have four wives, and had to contact the production of the film to clarify the relationships to me. I was told that one woman is a Farraj's neighbour, and the other one is his wife to whom he married late in his life.

The film shows that at first people outside of Cairo, the rural population, were disconnected from the events at the Tahrir Square. Those who started the revolution did not seem to represent fully the ordinary people working on the land, they did not coordinate their actions with the rest of the Egypt's population. Those at Tahrir Square were in the beginning mostly young men, and their personal frustrations and concerns did not appear to have been the same as of other population represented by the Farraj's family. Yet little by little, as Farraj reads newspapers and watches news with his children on his new satellite TV, he gets into the emotions of what is going on in Cairo and starts supporting the revolution.

Contrary to Farraj, his neighbour, the older woman, keeps her cool about the events throughout the film. She really gives the impression of being deeply rooted in the earth, as we see her in the very first shot in the film being seated on the ground by a country road. She does not get excited by all the turmoil caused by the deep political and geopolitical games going on in her country. She is an earthy person with a knowledge of what common and immediate life-supporting values are the most important ones.

Although the Farraj's household was followed with a camera during an extended period of time, we do not see them, not even once, having a meal together, which would have revealed much better the dynamics within the family. After all, family's meals represent not only the body nourishment but also a family consolidation ritual. It is important, since a family is a basic building block of a society.  

The film shows that very little had changed in the country for ordinary people regardless of the revolution, changes of presidents, and the general turmoil of all those political events.

A worthy film to see to remind oneself of a great French proverb:

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (Literally, “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)

Or is it the same thing?

Film's Official Synopsis

“What did the successive Egyptian revolutions mean for villagers living far from the action happening in Cairo? In this first feature, Anna Roussillon, a French citizen raised in Egypt, offers an important counterpoint to the spectacular images captured in Tahrir Square. In January 2011, when tens of thousands of demonstrators took to Cairo’s streets, the director started filming her friend Farraj and his family, peasants in the Luxor Valley. For two years, their television screens allowed them to follow the country’s political upheavals, as it experienced an alternately enthusiastic and painful experiment with democracy. With wit, empathy and a powerful rapport with her subjects, the director makes us feel their hopes and disappointments. A superb lesson in humanity.”

Presented in collaboration with the CSN, the Association du cinéma indépendant pour sa diffusion and the Consulat général de France à Québec.

COUNTRY : FRANCE
YEAR : 2014
LANGUAGE : ARABIC
SUBTITLES : FRENCH, ENGLISH
RUNTIME : 111 MIN
PRODUCTION : KARIM AITOUNA, MALIK MENAÏ, THOMAS MICOULET
CINEMATOGRAPHY : ANNA ROUSSILLON
EDITING : SASKIA BERTHOD, CHANTAL PIQUET
SOUND : JEAN-CHARLES BASTION

CONTACT
(PRODUCTION)
THOMAS MICOULET
HAUTLESMAINS PRODUCTIONS
CONTACT@HAUTLESMAINSPRODUCTIONS.FR

 

ANNA ROUSSILLON

FILMOGRAPHY

PREMIER LONG MÉTRAGE - FIRST FEATURE

Film's Trailer