2nd edition of the Montreal International History Film Festival
Travel back in time at here and elsewhere in the world at little cost!
Online June 4-14, 2020
And while history is being written at great speed, filmmaker Richard D. Lavoie and historians Éliane Bélec and Mathieu Trépanier are offering an online festival for its second edition from June 4 to 14. Thirty films in all their forms (documentary, fiction, animation, experimental, puppetry) and all formats (short, medium, long) are brought together on the same platform for only $20. Check out the online programming on fifhm.com.
The FIFHM allows you to delve into the heart of key moments in the history of many peoples and countries of the world during happy or darker times. This history-cinema duo is the first festival of its kind in Quebec and showcases the memory of our ancestors. Their decisions and behaviours during decisive moments have played a major role in the course of local, national and global history.
You can follow Gabriel Malenfant, of the Radio Radio group in search of his ancestors in Acadia, especially in the community of Cocagne; the inhabitants of the hamlet of Aas in the Pyrenees-Atlantiques who communicate by whistling will destabilize you without a shadow of a doubt and what a joy to see these elderly people still have so much pleasure in sharing their ancestral knowledge!; the closure of the Hôtel-Dieu in Montreal in 2017 (and who thought it would open again this year); the story of these brave girls better known as the Blue Squadron; the formidable mathematician Ada Lovelace who invented one of the first calculating machines, ancestor of computers; the children of Le Havre, beautifully told with paper characters; a Scottish Gaelic animated film commemorating the centenary of the sinking of the lolar; Georges Stout’s influence for the preservation of art and monuments; Elia Kazan, the greatest glory of American theater and cinema; and Alanis Obomsawin tells on the story of a grandfather who participated in the Restigouche incidents.
How do you recover from a cataclysm? A crisis? A war? How can we return to normal life after being struck down by a pandemic, a genocide? Perhaps by going through our history; watching the film about the famous black book of the USSR written by a journalist, a writer and an actor in 1953, but published only in 2010 or seeing unpublished images of Warsaw where we see the real intentions of the Nazis, but above all the resilience of an entire people; and what about the post-Great War in France, which was followed by the Spanish flu; and a close-up of Commander Massoud, a charismatic rebel who informed the Americans about a certain Bin Laden who was radicalized in the 1970s.
In short, history films that skilfully mix the small and the large like the film Espère de même pour toi, inspired by excerpts from the cult book EUROPEANA. A brief history of the 20th century, by Czech author Patrik Ourednik. This eclectic roster deconstructs the chronology and hierarchy of significant events, ranging from the death of God to the invention of the escalator, through Birkenau and positivism, the invention of chewing gum and that of the atomic bomb.
Check out the online programming on www.fifhm.com
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From June 4th to 14th, it’s a “historic” event not to be missed, to feed off some of the sweetness of the past and lessons learned the hard way…
