This week, the platform includes a selection of documentaries on the themes of exile and family. Next week, on the occasion of July 1st, a special program on the housing crisis will be offered. The films will be available for 8 weeks.
Starting June 25
A Dramatic Film (2019) by Éric Baudelaire. For 4 years, the filmmaker worked with students in the Parisian suburbs, from their entry in 6th grade (11 years old) to the end of college (15 years old). Together, they sought to answer the question: what are we doing together? From the discovery of the means of cinema to the exploration of the world around them, their quest leads to a dramatic film, that is to say neither a fiction nor a documentary, but the narrative of their lives in action.
Filmed in the form of a disenchanted and crazy tale, Oh La La Pauline(2015) takes us into the atypical family unit of filmmaker Émilie Brisavoine, who documents the adolescence of her half-sister. Between crises, quarrels, fights and the necessity of love, the heroine Pauline learns to better understand the complexity of their history in order to better free herself from it. A powerful and disturbing film.
Exiles
Exile is a powerful creative motivator that causes a shift that inspires and stirs up. The cult film News From Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman gives us access to the anxious and loving correspondence between a mother and her daughter, who left to work in New York. Fifi Howls from Happiness (2013) explores the complex relationship between Bahman Mohassess, an Iranian painter exiled in Rome since the 1950s, his work, and his country, which has forgotten him. A meeting of great intensity between filmmaker Mitra Farahani and the isolated lonely old dandy the painter became. One Sunday in Canada (1961) by Gilles Carle tells us about the state of the Italian community settled in Montreal in the 1960s. While dated, it works as a time capsule that shows the influence of direct cinema on NFB productions at the time.
Starting July 2: Inhabit the world
While the housing crisis threatens hundreds of families in Montreal and generates anxiety and exclusion for a part of the population which is forced year after year to increase its budget devoted to housing, Tënk offers a selection of 5 films to reflect on this fundamental need: to have a home.
Push (2019) by Fredrik Gertten is an excellent film that provides a better understanding of the soaring real estate prices. In all metropolises, high prices are pushing the middle classes and workers to the suburbs as hedge funds invest in real estate. Who owns the cities now? Bait (1980), by Israeli director Amos Gitaï, tells the story of a house in East Jerusalem and its many occupants, a metaphor for the construction of Israeli identity and its contradictions. Finally, Ziad Kalthoum‘s Taste of Cement (2017) reports on the situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon who work as construction workers and build a skyscraper, while their own homes are bombed. The film was awarded the Special jury prize – International feature, RIDM 2017.
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