The Festival du nouveau cinéma is now mature, official, in other words: responsible, more responsible than ever for film culture in Montreal and Quebec at large. Which, as it happens, is at odds with its own much-celebrated history of irreverence and independence. Five decades (!) of irresponsible clairvoyance in cinema, of the nouveau: not only a name, a title, but a mission, which should remain its first and foremost responsibility.
All eyes are on Zoé Protat and her team – will the former Head of Programming, now Artistic Director, keep the FNC true to its original punky nouveau philosophy, or seize the opportunity and make a more diplomatic, popular, industry-oriented event, a “festival of festivals” now that Serge Losique’s Montreal World Film Festival has come to an unfortunate end?
It seems obvious that the opportunity has been seized. After seeing this edition with my own eyes, and judging from all the first features films eligible for the FIPRESCI award, presented across competition; National, International, Panorama, Temps Ø, and Les nouveaux alchimistes. I’d say that, at this very moment, the FNC is one the most accomplished “festival of festivals” in the world, a lively, joyful celebration of cinephilia.
However, much has changed from a time when, in their own words, “the Festival introduces a little 31-minute short called Stranger Than Paradise… Encouraged by the Montreal audience response, director Jim Jarmusch extends the film to feature length and wins the Golden Camera at Cannes the following year!”
Now, like every celebration, the FNC feels ritualistic, confirming rather than affirming: most films premiered at Berlinale, Cannes, and, more unlikely, Rotterdam and Locarno – from a film professional’s point of view, there’s little sense of taking part in a search, in a discovery, in the nouveau on the big screen. And when it happens, when the screen shivers with excitement, everybody feels it – that’s why Mag Mag, the very intense and quirky J-horror debut feature of comedian Yuriyan Retriever, truly nouveau in spirit, for better and worse, received the Audience Award.
Of course, the FNC is spacious, even enormous, easily accommodating different audiences, industries, press, and expectations, etc. Yet some inclinations are evident – the talks and round tables were rather short, business as usual, about one hour each, and rather unsurprising (diversity, eco-responsability, the future of film criticism), more about financing films than the art of cinema. The main retrospective event, a Twin Peaks day and night, however wholesome, is no more than lazy programming, and, strangely enough, the actual ambitious retrospective (apart from that of Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s, apparently presented without subtitles), went under the radar: a guest programme of The Deuce Film Series from NYC, consisting of a 35mm double feature with Paul Morrissey’s Spike of Bensonhurst (1988) and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). Whatever the next step forward the festival will take, it’s clear to me that it has to be towards cinema.
This, however, does not mean that the FNC is short of important films, not by far – it just overstates the nouveau. When watching the debuts eligible for the FIPRESCI award, we encountered necessary topics (Kinga Michalska’s Bedrock) and sentimental education (Harry Lighton’s Pillion), eye-opening ideas about cinema (Paula Tomás Marques’s Two Times João Liberada, Lucia Selva’s Who Witnessed the Temples Fall) and truly ravishing stories (Diego Céspedes’s The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo – 2025’s Un Certain Regard). We even encountered a masterpiece – and one only, but one is already a lot –, Ernesto Martínez Bucio’s The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box), the winner of our FIPRESCI award.
Among these, a special film that was neither fully accomplished, politically urgent, aesthetically radical, heart- or eye-opening, but a bit of all at once: Vytautas Katkus’ The Visitor, a kitchen sink daydream about a young man’s temporary return to his hometown on the Lithuanian seaside, a business trip suspended in time. Right now, in Europe, the most interesting emerging filmmakers are working in Lithuania and Slovenia. The Visitor is at the heart of this Lithuanian New Wave, a collaboration between Katkus himself, who’s also DoP, best known for Saule Bliuvaite’s Toxic (Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival in 2024; Bliuvaite also plays a small role in the film), and other filmmaker fellows, including co-writer Marija Kavtaradzė, director of Slow (Best Director at Sundance, 2023), and editor Laurynas Bareisa (director of Drowning Dry, Best Director at Locarno 2024). It is, in many ways, what people call the film of a generation: a generation of filmmakers, among others, the homemovie of the Lithuanian New Wave.
Danielus (played by Darius Šilėnas), late 30s, is back in town, seemingly for the last time: he’s now based in Norway, married to a Norwegian woman and father of a little one (they speak in English at home), and has decided to sell his parents’ apartment after his father’s recent death. At home, or rather former home, the situation is strange: he knows almost everyone, while at the same time feeling estranged.
Šilėnas is a gagman, the kind of performer that measures the world through his body; while the role of Danielus, an awkward guy with more gestures than words, suits him right, especially in the kind of deadpan mise-en-scène that interests the director.
It’s a comedy of too long a time of, uncomfortable silences and bodies hanging in the air, about a man who doesn’t want to leave a place where nobody keeps him anymore which however badly phrased, is a fitting definition for home. And this very concrete understanding of humor through space, time and movement finds itself challenged, but also complemented, by curious, absurd moments of sorts, such as a mysterious isle hypnotizing the screen or a musical number coming out of nowhere.
It’s a film that loses and finds itself (and main characters, as in a city… town symphony) every now and then along its two hours, a formal peek-a-boo as charming as it is annoying. But either way, one encounters it as an original storyteller – and, more important, story-shower – telling a story as old as time itself, of homecoming, yet making it seem, making it feel anew. You need a profound understanding of cinema – and life itself, as it’s also a matter of time, space, and movement – to make a film like this. I’m happy that the FNC understands such understandings.
By Călin Boto
Edited by David Voight
Copyright FIPRESCI