Film: HOCHELAGA, LAND OF SOULS

Director François Girard
Canada 2017
99 minutes

Writer François Girard
Editor Gaétan Huot
Cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc
Cast Samian, Raoul Max Trujillo, Vincent Perez

The latest from internationally acclaimed director François Girard (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Red Violin), Hochelaga, Land of Souls is a mesmerizing time travel drama spanning eight centuries of layered indigenous, colonial, and contemporary histories. When a sinkhole suddenly opens up on the field of a downtown Montreal football stadium during a game, the city’s past and present begin to intersect. As part of the investigation of the event, an archaeological dig is set up on the site, believed to have been at one time the Iroquois village of Hochelaga. Uncovering artefacts and clues to Montreal’s extraordinary past, Baptiste Asigny, a young archaeologist of Mohawk heritage, embarks on an incredible journey of discovery through the tangled history of his at once modern and ancient city. Girard’s film moves seamlessly between pre-European times, the age of the French explorer Jacques Cartier and his first contact with the Iroquois people, as well as the subsequent convulsive political and social events that occurred in this very space over the centuries right up to Asigny’s own contemporary Montreal. It is an imaginative cinematic weave, a stunning tapestry of time and space, memory and identity.

François Girard’s remarkable career has spanned video art, television, contemporary dance, music, and cinema, and has yielded such diverse works as Le dortoir (1991), Peter Gabriel’s Secret World Live (1994), and Bach Cello Suite #2: The Sound of Carceri (1997). His feature films include: Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), The Red Violin (1998), Silk (2007), and Boychoir (2014). Girard has also directed operas at international venues, including most recently his critically acclaimed Parsifal in New York.

Film: Just to Be Sure - Ôtez-moi d'un doute

Carine Tardieu
2017 France/Belgium
100 minutes

Family ties don’t get much more complicated than the ones in this witty, winning seriocomic charmer. Erwan (François Damiens) is a middle-aged bomb disposal expert who finds himself facing a different kind of explosive situation when he learns that the man who raised him is not, in fact, his biological father—and that the woman (Cécile de France) he is seeing may in fact be his half-sister. What sounds like the makings of a Greek tragedy plays out with sparkling élan thanks to the clever script and sharply drawn characters—flawed, flesh-and-blood people fumbling their way through extraordinary circumstances.

Music: Wu Man & Huayin Shadow Puppet Band NYC 2018

Wu Man
(this video is from a 2017 performance):
(this video comes from an earlier performance in Sydney in 2014):

Film: The Lion Sleeps Tonight - Le lion est mort ce soir

Nobuhiro Suwa
2017 France/Japan
103 minutes

Living legend Jean-Pierre Léaud stars in this playfully self-reflexive ghost story, which functions as a consideration of cinema, mortality, and the actor’s own status as an emblem of film history. He plays Jean, an aging movie actor who, as he prepares to shoot a death scene, finds himself visited by the spirit of a dead, long-ago lover (Pauline Etienne). Meanwhile, he has visitors of another kind: a band of children who cast him in the DIY haunted house movie they are making. Director Nobuhiro Suwa channels the spirit of Rivette as he spins a wonderfully loose-limbed tale that delights in the infinite possibilities of filmmaking. Plus: the gratifying sight of Léaud chucking apples at a gaggle of pesky youngsters.

Film: The Workshop - L’atelier

https://youtu.be/MAFGIe6GcBg

Laurent Cantet
2017 France
113 minutes

The Class director Laurent Cantet returns with another unique, provocative exploration of French society as seen through the eyes of the next generation. In the sunny coastal town of La Ciotat, a diverse group of teenagers assembles for a summer writer’s workshop led by Parisian novelist Olivia (César Best Actress nominee Marina Foïs). As the group talks through the novel they are co-writing—a murder mystery set in their town—the ethnic and political fault lines between them are gradually exposed, provoked by the brooding Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), whose fascination with far-right extremism grows increasingly worrying. What plays out is a tense, gripping, up-to-the-minute dispatch on the state of contemporary France.

Film: See You Up There - Au revoir là-haut

https://youtu.be/WMTyn_fKjCM
Albert Dupontel
2017 France/Canada
117 minutes

Nominated for a whopping 13 César Awards, including Best Film, this stylish comic caper is a breathless, whimsical wild ride through Jazz Age Paris. After an accident in the trenches leaves him disfigured, ex–World War I infantryman and artist Edouard (BPM star Nahuel Perez Biscayart) takes to opium and creating outrageously stylized masks to hide his scarred face. Along with a fellow former soldier (director Albert Dupontel), he hatches an audacious get-rich-quick scheme: designing and collecting on war monuments, then absconding with the money before building them. What ensues is a dizzying adventure bursting with elaborately staged set-pieces and spectacularly surreal costume design.

From the book: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/may-august/au-revoir-la-haut-pierre-lemaitre
The title of Au revoir là-haut (Goodbye until we meet in heaven) comes from a letter written by a soldier just before his execution for treason in 1914. It is a sign of the emotions that permeate the book. Awarded the 2013 Prix Goncourt, Au revoir là-haut portrays a society that wants to honor the dead but also forgets the living veterans.

Film: Jeannette, The Childhood of Joan of Arc

Bruno Dumont
2017 France
105 minutes

The ever-unpredictable Bruno Dumont (Slack Bay) takes another thrilling hairpin turn with this audacious, 15th century-set heavy metal musical composed by Igorrr (aka Gautier Serre). It’s 1425, and 8-year-old shepherdess Jeannette—the future Joan of Arc—already has the weight of the French nation on her shoulders as she grapples with matters of the soul, the ongoing Hundred Years’ War, and the feeling that she is meant for something great. Along the way there are head-banging nuns, surreal angelic visions, and a cavalcade of hard-stomping electro-rock song and dance numbers recorded live on location. The result is an ecstatically unique and transportive experience that is, at heart, the story of a young heroine realizing her destiny.

Film: The Sower - Le semeur

Marine Francen
2017 France/Belgium
98 minutes

In the midst of Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état, a remote French village is depleted of all its men, leaving only the women to tend to the fields while wondering what became of their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers. Into this matriarchal society wanders a stranger (Alban Lenoir), his presence stirring up both political suspicion and carnal desire among the young women, who view him as their last chance to repopulate the community. Through bucolic, golden-hued images that recall the paintings of Jean-François Millet, director Marine Francen weaves a quietly provocative, fable-like tale that rewrites its historical moment from a female perspective.

Film: A Paris Education

Jean-Paul Civeyrac
2018 France
137 minutes

Etienne (Andranic Manet), a serious and impressionable shaggy-haired young cinephile, leaves behind his steady girlfriend (Diane Rouxel) in Lyon to study film in Paris. Settling into a dingy flat with a rotating cast of roommates, he immerses himself in a bohemian world of artists, intellectuals, and fellow film geeks who excitedly share their passion for Bresson, Ford, and obscure Russian directors. It’s a seemingly idyllic life of the mind—until more complicated matters of the flesh, as well as jealous creativity, intrude.

Shooting in timeless black and white and interweaving references to philosophy, music, and cinema—from Pascal to Mahler to Parajanov—unsung auteur Jean-Paul Civeyrac conjures a bittersweet ode to the heady days of student life.

Film: Montparnasse Bienvenüe

Léonor Serraille
2017 France
97 minutes

When the toxic 10-year relationship that has defined her adult life implodes, 31-year-old Paula (rising star Laetitia Dosch, nominated for a Best Newcomer César Award) finds herself adrift on Paris’ Left Bank. With no money, no job, and no idea what’s next, the turbulent Paula resorts to a series of desperate lies in order to keep a roof over her head. But this young woman is more resilient than even she initially realizes.

Made by an almost entirely female crew, Léonor Serraille’s debut feature—winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes for best first film—is a refreshingly complex portrait of an all-too-human heroine veering between instability and strength as she makes a place for herself in the world.