Montreal Film Festival 2011 sets the stage

MONTREAL - You won’t see Brad Pitt, but you may glimpse Catherine Deneuve, whose career is being celebrated in a tribute as Montreal’s 35th World Film Festival shows 383 films from 70 countries, from Aug. 18 to 28.
And while it can no longer match the Toronto International Film Festival in terms of glamour, the World Film Fest has lots to offer true cinema fans, according to founder Serge Losique.
“You can’t just go get Hollywood starlets,” he said. “You have to see what’s happening in Kazakhstan, Lebanon and Guinea – countries that don’t exist on the cinematic map but whose films talk about the issues of their people.
“If we only watched American films, we would never have Quebec Cinema. Now our cinema can compete with any country in the world. We look for quality. That’s how we have succeeded in imposing ourselves.”
The festival’s opening film is the Quebec-made Coteau rouge, André Forcier’s multi-pronged tale starring Roy Dupuis and Céline Bonnier in a story involving dead bodies, a real estate developer, an ex-boxer and a surrogate grandmother.
Among the films in competition are: La run, another Quebec production, directed by Demian Fuica and starring Jason Roy-Léveillé as a young man getting sucked into a world of drugs as he tries to help his compulsive gambler father; Playoff (Israel-France), Eran Riklis’s story of an Israeli basketball coach who gets an offer to lead the German national team; Geoffrey Enthoven’s Hasta la Vista (Belgium), about three physically challenged men trying to pick up women on a trip to Spain; Life Back Then (Japan), Takahisa Zeze’s tale of a man and women whose work is to dispose of the property of people who die alone; The Mole (Poland), by Rafael Lewandowski, about a young man who learns his father is a Communist informer; Max Lemcke’s Cinco Metros Cuadrados (Spain), in which a couple fight a corrupt condo developer; Brigitte Maria Bertele’s The Fire (Germany), about a woman seeking justice after she is raped; and Bahram Tavakoli’s Here Without Me, an Iranian adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.
The fest’s First Films competition screens 26 feature-length debuts from 21 countries, including: Simon Franco’s Less Modern Times (Argentina-Chile); Beck Cole’s Here I Am (Australia); Leena Manimekalai’s The Dead Sea (India); Lucian Georgescu’s The Phantom Father (Romania); and Shaker K. Tahrer’s Bloody Boys (Sweden).
Among the films showing out of competition are: Li Qiankun and Xiao Giuyun’s The Star and the Sea (China); Xavier Durringer’s La conquête (France); Reza Mirkarimi’s A Cube of Sugar (Iran); and Lucio Pellegrini’s La Vita Facile (Italy).
The Focus On World Cinema series contains 73 feature films and 70 shorts, from Charles Wahl’s Webdultery (Canada) to Mohammed Al Hushi’s Transit Cities (Jordan), and Sonia Fritz’s América (Puerto Rico).
Other sections of the fest include Documentaries Of the World, the Canadian Student Film Festival, Movies Under the Stars (this year’s theme: “Bollywood, Hollywood and The Girls”), and Our Cinema, a look back on 20 films released in Quebec in the last year.