Cinéfranco’s Spécial Québec Returns
by Staff
(March 28, 2018 – Toronto, ON) La Tournée du Cinema Québecois in partnership with Cinéfranco returns to Toronto for the annual Toronto showcase of the best of recent Québecois cinema. This year’s Cinéfranco Spécial Québec will offer up 6 features and a program of shorts by Indigenous youth as well as special guests including esteemed director, playwright, novelist and essayist Bernard Émond and directors Pascal Plante and Mélissa Lefebvre. Cinéfranco Spécial Québec opens on Saturday, April 14 at 2pm with a raucous comedy by director Nicolas Monette. In Le Trip à Trois, Estelle who leads a stable and predictable life with her husband and daughter decides to shake things up by pursuing a threesome.
At 4:30pm, special guest director Pascal Plante will answer questions about his movie Les Faux Tatouages (Fake Tattoos), a drama about Théo, a shy guy who is blindsided at his 18th birthday celebration by a punk-rock romance.
Saturday’s program wraps at 7pm with director Bernard Émond (La Neuvaine) who will introduce and participate in a Q+A after a screening of his newest film. A road trip, Pour Vivre Ici (A Place To Live) reunites Émond with actress Élise Guilbault. Guilbault plays a sixty-something woman who after her husband’s death travels from his small town on the Côte-Nord to visit his children in Montreal and the places of his childhood in Northern Ontario.
Sunday’s program begins at 2pm with Guillaume Lambert’s Les Scènes Fortuites (My Intelligent Comedy). Thirty-something filmmaker Damien finds himself in debt, working in a post-house to stay afloat and unable to complete his film in this biting satire of the Québec film business.
A program of three shorts by young Indigenous filmmakers at 4:15pm is followed by Bagages, a documentary-hybrid that gives a voice to newly arrived teenaged immigrants in Montreal. Through drama, workshops and theatrical productions they speak of their experiences with remarkable wisdom, powerful emotion and disarming authenticity. Co-director Melissa Lefebvre will attend for a Q+A following the screening.
La Tournée du Cinéma Québecois runs Saturday, April 14 & Sunday, April 15, at the Carlton Cinemas in Toronto. More information and tickets are available online from Cinéfranco.
