GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!!!
This year the FNM offers a badge called code 1520 that allow students from15 to 20 years of age to assist 6 film's projection for 3$ only!
CODE 1520: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Testuya Nomura, Takeshi Nozue (Japan) will have its North American Premiere; A.V., Pan Ho Cheung (Hong Kong); Zim & Co, Pierre Jolivet (France); Pure, Jim Donovan (Quebec/Canada); Greg & Gentillon, Matthiew Klinck (Quebec/Canada); Next, a Primer on Urban Painting, Pablo Aravena (Quebec/Canada).
Here are the BAD NEWS:
FF VII...two of the three seances are alreay complete.
A.V's first and only projection was yesterday...
GET OUT THERE AND GET THOSE BADGES!
没空做义工，咱们就帮忙宣传宣传。
FNM记得是CA出道最早的影节了，可老来还被FIFM往后挤了一挡，
两拨人马还抢参展片，拼得个你死我活的，本来就僧多粥少嘛...
本是同根生，相煎何太急啊。
How to get your hands on it?
PRESALES
October 8 » 13 – from 12 a.m. to 8 p.m.
EX-CENTRIS |
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SINGLE TICKET |
10 $ |
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STUDENTS AND SENIORS |
7 $ |
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GROUPS (15 and more) |
6 $ |
+ one free ticket for every 15 people in your group. |
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TICKET BOOKLETS
(limited availability) |
5 tickets |
40 $ |
10 tickets |
75 $ |
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FESTIVAL BADGES
(limited availability)
Including the official catalogue |
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PRESALES
October 3rd – badges presales |
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FESTIVAL BADGE |
150 $ |
The Festival Badge includes admission to all Festival screenings and events except the opening and closing galas. |
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IMPÉRIAL BADGE |
100 $ |
The Imperial Badge provides admission to all screenings at the Imperial Cinema, including the opening and closing galas. |
Zero doubt
Melora Koepke
In some ways, Julien Fonfrède is a typical festival programmer. I like to imagine him as a sleazy film industry mover, on jet plane jaunts from Cannes to Venice to Rotterdam, ear glued to a cellphone, tastemaking new talent, breaking stories and making deals. But alas, Fonfrède's way of doing business is way more punk rock than that.
"I wish that was my life!" he says. "The only trip I did last year was to Cannes, and basically, going to Cannes for me means seeing all the things I think I want to see, and realizing none of them are any good. Cannes is a timesaver, the elimination round. After it ends, I start my real work - speaking to my whole network, asking people about other films they know about that nobody has seen yet, keeping my ear to the ground."
The Festival du nouveau cinéma hired Fonfrède, who was for many years a core programmer at Fantasia, last year. His mission? To create a new festival-within-the-festival, Temps zéro, aimed at younger, cooler crowds - the Fantasia factor, if you will. It proves that the FNC, unlike other festivals in town, is less interested in navigating egos and grifting grants than in surfing the breaking new waves of world cinema.
"To a certain extent, they wanted me to change the image of the festival, and to program things they did not have the expertise to program. Temps zéro was this new, cutting-edge cool side of the FNC that fits in really well with what [festival director] Claude [Chamberlan] was doing."
Temps zéro 2005 is hardly an auteur
festival program in the sense you'd expect - it's a far cry from the sombre sepia auteur-mumblings of yesteryear. Rather, it's an explosion of colour, a Babel of languages, a complete intellectual mind-fuck of genre and emotion unlike anything you can find anywhere else throughout the festival year here in Montreal. More importantly for Fonfrède (and for the audience), Temps zéro addresses the most crucial challenge of "new" (read: experimental) movies, which is to make audiences want to watch them.
"I'm attracted to movies that destroy the frontiers of our expectations," says Fonfrède. "Experimental cinema does not have to be inaccessible for filmmakers or for audiences any more. Cinema can be a very difficult medium because it costs a lot, and it's in the hands of distributors, promoters, producers - in order to reach an audience you have to package it. It's tough to make a movie now, it's really, really tough. It costs too much."
Fonfrède should know - this year, in addition to his programming duties, he produced a film, La Belle bête, directed by ex-Fantasia programmer Karim Hussain. Written by famous Quebec romancière Marie-Claire Blais and starring a veritable vortex of Quebec vedettes (Carole Laure, Caroline Dhavernas, David La Haye, Marc-André Grondin), the film, distributed by Equinoxe for release in 2006 or after, is cloaked in secrecy. Accolades for Fonfrède's programming work, however, are closer at hand.
"The director of the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes came to me and said, 'It's funny, all these directors in competition here now started at Fantasia years ago.' We're talking about Miike, Johnny To - Johnny To had 15 films play at Fantasia before he was in the spotlight anywhere else, because nobody wanted to say Johnny To was good."
"The French wouldn't admit it, because they did not discover him themselves," Fonfrède laughs mischievously (he's originally French-from-France himself).
In a few years, it's easy to imagine Cannes going the same shade of green over Temps zéro and the FNC.
The Goods
Here are some highlights of this year's Temps zéro program:
Main Hoon Na (Farah Khan, India) was the #1 box office hit in India in 2004. Themed on the hot-button issue of Indian-Pakistani relations, it follows an army major who yearns to see peace between the two nations, so he goes undercover at a high school to protect a general's daughter. Farah Khan, the director, is a well-known Bollywood choreographer, and Main Hoon Na takes the colour and movement of the genre to a new level. "Grease meets Die Hard, but it's a musical!" says Fonfrède. "This is an über-commercial movie, Hollywood times 10 - it's like sucking the sugar out of a candy bar, pure pleasure. It's very mainstream, but everything is so artistically done, you cannot be more populist than this."
Four (Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Russia) is a gorgeous, dark brain-teaser in which four people meet up in an urban dive-bar to tell each other lies about themselves - or are they lies? This puzzle starts with a pack of four stray dogs in a rainy street chased by four apocalyptic machines, and goes from there into mythologizing the nightmare of recombinant genetics. "Four is a Russian movie, so you have to expect something that's very Russian, but that can be cool! This is sci-fi that is not sci-fi, in a village full of all sorts of strange old women," says Fonfrède enigmatically. "It's very strange."
Ex-Centris plans a beautiful projection for Nuit noire (Olivier Smolders, Belgium) because "it absolutely has to be seen in a theatre," says Fonfrède . "It's so beautiful it's fascinating. This is a very weird movie, with all the elements of fairytales mixed together, creating this very claustrophobic world, set in a museum of natural history. This is like David Lynch, but I believe that it goes much further in terms of experimentation. It's a weird trip about mutant sexuality, influenced by bandes dessinées, from Tintin to Jacques Tardi's Adèle Blanc-Sec [French psychosexual comic-book heroine]."
Gô Shibata is a reigning scion of the Osaka underground who had his first short at Fantasia years ago, and Late Bloomer (Japan) is a riveting cinéma vérité masterpiece about how love drives one man insane. Mr. Sumida is a handicapped patient who falls in love with his beautiful young helper, and his unrequited feelings drive him to become the world's first physically challenged serial killer. "This is probably my favourite movie this year... it really moved me. It's Japanese, so the usual Japanese thing, 'I love you, I kill you'... It's something taboo, especially in North America, because it's so not politically correct to view handicapped people as [potential killers]. It's like starting to watch My Left Foot, and then you realize it's not that. It has been described as the Taxi Driver of handicapped movies, and that's apt."
The Family That Eats Soil (Khavn de la Cruz, Philippines): "Okay, this is a real discovery. Punk-rock hyper-political moviemaking from the Filipino underground - angry, in-your-face, but still really fun to watch. It's cool when those films with very little means can be done in an efficient and powerful way. De la Cruz is the Lars von Trier of the Philippines, he even has his own manifesto where he tells the filmmakers of the Third World to definitely say no to 35 mm and turn to video."
Haze (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan) is a 50-minute masterpiece from a master -Tsukamoto was a Fantasia favourite, and anyone who has seen Tetsuo, The Iron Man, Tokyo Fist or Bullet Ballet will be excited to see this beautiful movie that's so hard to watch. Preceded by two unmissable shorts: Laurie Anderson's Hidden Inside Mountains, and My Dad Is 100 Years Old by Guy Maddin.
A.V. (Pang Ho Cheung, Hong Kong) is indicative of a new movement in Asia, of indie movies à la Kevin Smith - low-budget, script-driven features devoid of high-flying action. A.V. (it stands for Adult Video) is the story of a group of bored high-school audiovisual club nerds who decide to pose as adult film producers in order to have sex with Japan's leading porn actress. Very American Pie/Girl Next Door, but weirdly uptight and Asian.
Yaji and Kita - the Midnight Pilgrims (Kankurô Kudô, Japan) is a window in to the weirdest the Japanese punk underground has to offer. Kankurô Kudô, a former writer for Takashi Miike, comes from a contemporary art background, and Yaji and Kita is his directorial debut. This is not a film for normal people. Basically, a psychedelic, semi-nonsensical trip through space and time, half-manga, half-B-movie. "Yaji and Kita is a huge cult phenomenon in Japan," say Fonfrède. "It's basically a gay Bill and Ted's, mixed with Alice in Wonderland, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, lots of drugs, and Monty Python laughs. Rock'n'roll samurai Easy Rider, sometimes a weird version of Bergman, in space, where you have mushrooms growing out of your head."
Bangkok Loco (Phornchai Hongrathanaphorn, Thailand): Bay (Krisada Sukoson), a young rock'n'roll drum hero, snaps out of a drum-solo trance to find that his sticks have turned to knives in his hands (see front cover), with the minced-up body of his landlady laying nearby. Bay sets out, with the help of the Drum God, to prove his innocence, while an Evil Drummer who looks suspiciously like a Japanese Ringo Starr is the true villain. Basically it's Help! on lots of acid, with lots of drum solos. "Bangkok Loco represents what Thailand does best these days," says Fonfrède. "A cinema that comes from another planet. They take everything that exists, mix it together and come out with HK martial-arts musical retro-pop psychedelia, with horror-movie bits and really dumb humour. Everything is blue and red, and there are giant pink elephants. Or maybe that's in Yaji and Kita - I don't remember. One of these movies has giant pink elephants. We could make a contest! See all the Temps zéro movies, find the pink elephants, win a prize!"
