Homegrown Films Playing at Fantasia
By Maurie Alioff – Quebec Correspondent
(July 30, 2024 – Montréal, QC) As the Fantasia International Film Festival grew over the years, it cranked up its commitment to local content. Artistic Director and beloved-by-cheering-audiences Mitch Daviss told me during a recent interview, “We like to open or close with a Quebec film when we can.” Slotted in as the 2024 closer on August 4th, Marc-André Forcier’s Ababouiné (image below) is not exactly a genre picture, but as a typically Forcierian button-pushing, even subversive film, it fits the bill. On top of Ababouiné, the festival scheduled various other new Canadian productions and retro screenings of classics.
Forcier night felt like “the right cosmic thing to do,” Davis says with his hyperbolic enthusiasm. “To celebrate Forcier as the closing event is really quite something.” Long thought of as the bad boy of Quebec cinema, he is, says Davis, “such a legendary director. To have him at the festival is great, and to actually have him as a centrepiece focus is something that feels so good.” The moviemaker picks up the festival’s Denis Héroux award as Fantasia world premieres his 17th feature. Forcier’s best-known titles include L’Eau chaude l’eau frette, Le vent du Wyoming, and in my opinion his craziest, most transcendent film, Au Clair de la lune.
“Being the closing Film,” Davis continues, “means the trades are going to announce it, and that all the US press covering Fantasia will mention it. The last bunch of Forcier films have not had distribution in the US, and most of Europe to my knowledge. The closing screening and tribute is a beautiful package.”
Starring a roster of Quebec vedtettes that includes Rémy Girard, Gaston Lepage, Pascale Montpetit, Éric Bruneau, and Mylène Mackay, Ababouiné travels back to the 1950s, when the Catholic Church tyrannized Quebeckers in every aspect of their lives, particularly the bedroom. The movie depicts a youthful rebellion against the priests, led by Michel (Rémi Brideau), a 12-year-old who suffers from polio. Michel works in a library- print shop that publishes a demand for the separation of church and state. Of course, the empire strikes back.
Forcier’s movie highlights the Oratoire Saint-Joseph, (Saint Joseph Oratory), the gigantic cathedral on Mount Royal, that rivals Paris’s Notre Dame in size with a massive dome almost as big as St. Peter’s. Before the construction of the cathedral, which took 52 years, Alfred Bessette, or Brother André, built a small chapel, which still stands on the site. Canonized in 1982, Saint André was widely believed to be a miracle worker who healed thousands of people of every infirmity imaginable.
After André died in 1937, his preserved heart was put on display in an urn. And in maybe the weirdest crime in Canadian history, sophisticated thieves robbed the heart in March 1973. It was eventually and mysteriously recovered. Sounds like the basis for a movie that could play Fantasia.
For Mitch Davis, the St. Joseph Oratory story is another reason to be intrigued by Forcier’s movie, which might be referencing Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal, set largely around the cathedral. “I was quite fascinated by Brother André’s heart as a kid,” Davis recalls. “I was at the Basilica during a school outing, and I was completely taken by the idea of the heart interred in a wall, this foggy thing through glass.”
Among other Canadian content at Fantasia 2024 – screenings of two 4K restorations. Allan (Bozo) Moyle’s The Rubber Gun was a 1977 release about the complicated relationship between a sociology student (Moyle) and a drug dealer (Steven Lack, who handled the post screening Q&A). Rubber Gun transforms into a heist story and is a follow-up to Montreal Main (1974), in my opinion equal to some of John Cassavetes’s rawest projects. The festival also nabbed Gerald (Heavy Metal) Potterton’s Tiki Tiki, a daring merge of live action and animation. The movie featured Ted Zeigler, creator and host of the beloved Johnny Jellybean Show and with Peter Cullen The Buddies, which ages ago I did some writing for at CTV affiliate CFCF-TV.
Mitch Davis told me he’s pleased that Steven Lack represented The Rubber Gun at the festival. “Even if the audience doesn’t know his work as a painter, they know him as the star of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. There are very few chances to meet him in the genre context.” Lack’s paintings, by the way, are often a stunning interplay between harsh reality and dreaminess rendered with extraordinary colour pallets.
“Many Canadian films have fallen off our radar,” says Davis. “Thankfully, Canadian International Pictures (CIP) is doing a lot of restorations, re-introducing these movies to young, quasi-hipster cinephile audiences. Another movie from the Montreal Main team, East End Hustle came out as a 4K Blu-ray that sold phenomenally well. CPI also restored Larry Kent’s Bitter Ash, the 4K that we played last year.
“I’m happy that Larry Kent’s work is getting released,” Davis continues. “A new generation is seeing his work and talking about it for the first time. At the screening of Bitter Ash last year, the majority of the audience was under 30. Usually re-evaluation occur long after the artist is gone. Thank God Larry is still here for everything, and he’s such a treasure.”
David Marriott, co-founder of Canadian International Pictures and John Doyle, told a reporter, “Our mission with CIP was to champion Canadian film classics from the second half of the 20th century. We loved a lot of these films, but we felt they were also so under-represented in the market for cinephiles as well as general audiences in Canada and the U.S. John Doyle and I thought it would be a blast to bring some of these titles which were often virtually unknown to audiences, who would view them as new films, be they art or genre — to fill a void with titles that make Canadian and Québécois films so unique.”
Other Canadian films at Fantasia include the silly-hearted Frankie Freako!, directed by Steven Kostanski. It’s a world premiere like The Silent Planet by writer-director Jeffrey St. Jules, which concerns prisoners on an other-worldly penal colony. Also world premiering, Scared Shitless by director Vivieno Caldinelli, writer-director Lowell Dean’s Dark Match (image below), which finds horror among low rent wresters.
Recalling I Care a Lot, about a scammer caregiver of the elderly, Karl R. Hearne’s American-Canadian production The G goes full tilt revenge when a septuagenarian goes after her exploiter-abuser. Slated to screen August 2 and 4, Michael Pierro’s Self-Driver travels with a Toronto rideshare operator, who must submit to a powerful app. Meanwhile Canadian writer-director Naomi Jaye’s Darkest Miriam plays as a mixed genre piece about a librarian, conflating romance and thriller.
Fantasia launched in 1996 mainly as an outlet for Hong Kong and Japanese martial fantasy extravaganzas, began programming US and European pictures while expanding Asian content, and now features a solid block of genre from Canada and Quebec. Fantasia 2024 wraps on August 4.
Also see: Fantasia 2024: Horror Stories and Streaming Horrors.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and taught screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, he is affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.Info. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. He is the Québec Correspondent for Northernstars™.
