Report: Montréal World Film Festival 2010

I real­ized that all I’d posted about my trip to Montréal so far was my list of films to see and then a few reviews. I wanted to post a little bit about my trip and about the fest­ival exper­i­ence itself, in case any of you are thinking of making the journey in the future.

I returned this past Wednesday after spending five days at the 34th edi­tion of the Festival des films du monde. Started just one year after Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (now known as TIFF), Montréal’s oldest film fest­ival has remained the per­sonal pro­ject of Serge Losique, who has determ­ined to keep its focus on (mostly) European art cinema. Although it has gradu­ally been dwarfed by Toronto’s jug­ger­naut, it still offers a huge range of pro­gram­ming (430 films from 80 coun­tries!) and it has plenty to offer cinephiles who don’t mind doing their home­work. Not to men­tion that it takes place in a beau­tiful city and that tickets cost a frac­tion of what TIFF is char­ging these days.

One of the things I like about MWFF’s pro­gram­ming is that it fea­tures a pretty wide range of what I’d call more com­mer­cial offer­ings from a few European mar­kets. For instance, Quebécers are big fans of French cinema, so instead of only get­ting a few “important” films like at TIFF, this fest­ival offers everything from com­edies to thrillers, not only from France, but from places like Belgium and Spain as well. I also think that M. Losique and his pro­gram­ming team must be fans of the national cinema of places like Russia and the Balkan coun­tries, for those seem to have healthy rep­res­ent­a­tion in the pro­gramme, at least over the two years that I’ve attended.

I pur­chased the 10-coupon booklet for $65 (all taxes included) this year, and that also gave me a $5 dis­count on the pro­gramme guide, which nor­mally sells for $20. Compare this to TIFF’s prices ($160 plust HST and “fees” for 10 tickets, $32 plus HST and “fees” for the pro­gramme guide) and you’ll see what I mean about MWFF being a bar­gain. Apart from the cost, the fest­ival exper­i­ence is far less stressful as well. Unfortunately, that’s mostly due to the lack of crowds. It would be nice to see a few more sold-out screenings.

There are a few quirks. First of all, and this may be a problem with most fest­ivals, but the web site needs some work. It’s nav­ig­able, but it needs to be updated in a more timely way. Even as a news­letter sub­scriber, I wasn’t noti­fied when the pro­gramme was announced, nor was there a press release posted on the web site. For the record, the fest­ival announced the full lineup on August 10th, but I had to dig around on the site to finally figure out when it had been updated.

Another caveat is that, although most films are shown with English sub­titles, there are a few that are not. Last year, for instance, it was only when I was standing in line to get my ticket that I real­ized that the Spanish film I was anti­cip­ating was screening with French sub­titles only. The key is looking for the let­ters “s.t.a.” (sous-titres anglais) in the printed schedule or on indi­vidual film pages of the web site. It can be deceiving since every film descrip­tion in the pro­gramme guide and on the web site is trans­lated into English, leading one to believe that an English speaker can actu­ally see and under­stand every film in the fest­ival. It doesn’t happen often, but if you want to avoid dis­ap­point­ment, check the schedule carefully.

Normally, each film screens sev­eral times but there some that may only screen once, another reason to check the schedule before­hand when plan­ning your dates. Last year, I attended from Monday through Friday, and I found that many of the films I wanted to see were not pro­grammed on the week­days. Including a weekend this year turned out to be a good idea.

This year, I saw 9 films. I had a ticket for a tenth (The Myth of the American Sleepover, which I sub­sequently heard great things about), but opted for an early night instead. I haven’t written about all of them yet, but hope to get at least one more review posted before the mad­ness of TIFF begins.

I also got to enjoy a little of the city itself. I stayed in an apart­ment in the Mile End neigh­bour­hood owned by the mother of my friend Nicolas Gulino, a doc­u­mentary film­maker. Although I didn’t get to spend as much time with Nicolas as I would have liked, the apart­ment was in a fant­astic loc­a­tion, 5 minutes’ walk from both Fairmount Bagel, Montréal’s oldest bagel bakery, and Dieu du Ciel, home of some of the most sub­lime micro­brews I have ever tasted.

For the past two years, MWFF has proved to be a tasty appet­izer for TIFF. If you have the time, I’d recom­mend checking it out. I took the train, and VIA’s ser­vice is com­fort­able, con­venient to down­town, and rel­at­ively inex­pensive. They even have free wi-fi on the trains.

Here are a couple of photos. They’re not great, since my camera was on full zoom and so they’re a bit blurry. They are, in order, Pete Smalls is Dead (review) dir­ector Alexandre Rockwell, star Seymour Cassel, Limbo (review) dir­ector Maria Sødahl, stars Line Verndal and Bryan Brown.

Tagged as: #mwff10, Montréal