October 25, 2024

By José Teodoro

Among annual events I try to frequent, the Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal (FNC) is among the most reliable sources of excellent films I mightn’t otherwise see. I’ve attended FNC as a regular spectator, as a critic, as a participant in their wonderful Nouveau marché for co-production development, and, this year, as one of three jurors for the FIPRESCI Prize. Because FNC is modest in scale and places no special premium on premiere status, its programs are filled with selections that are wholeheartedly championed by the festival’s handful of programmers. Most of the best films I screened at the 53^rd FNC, which ran from October 9^th to 20^th, had already debuted at Rotterdam, Berlinale, New Directors/New Films, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, San Sebastián, or, of course, TIFF.

In fact, two TIFF ’24 titles from beloved Canadian directors (and Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize alumni), Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Measures for a Funeral and Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night, both earned major awards at FNC. Yet the placement of such films at FNC doesn’t feel like a “best of” sampling from bigger, more prestigious events happening elsewhere; rather, it feels like that increasingly rare thing: genuine curation for a genuine community. Often aligning with a highly particular aesthetic and/or political sensibility, these are the films the programmers saw over the preceding nine months that they most wanted to share with Montréal cinephiles. As an outsider granted a pass, I was delighted to crash the party.

I felt that Phạm Ngọc Lân’s feature debut Cu Li Never Cries was easily among the loveliest, most transporting films at FNC and, happily, my co-jurors agreed: it won the FIPRESCI Prize. Gorgeously photographed in black and white, the film begins with a woman’s return to her home in Vietnam following the death of her long-estranged husband, who left their country years ago to work abroad, and from whom she inherits a pygmy slow loris, an absurdly charismatic animal whose bulbous eyes seem to observe and absorb everything. From its opening scenes, with their images of narrow streets and cramped homes, and the elegant movement both of and within the frame, Cu Li Never Cries imparts an immersive sense of place while luring us into a mood of ongoing spatial and temporal disorientation. The widowed woman feels weary, frustrated, and adrift in life, frequently referring to herself as old, although she is fit, mobile, and curious, and doesn’t look much over 60. Meanwhile, the niece that the widowed woman has long parented is preparing to marry, although her life, too, seems far from fixed on an auspicious trajectory: she and her fiancé run a humble day care out of their home. The film’s behavioural humour and universal themes of familial conflict and rites of passage place it broadly within the tradition of Yazujirō Ozu, yet its movement between urban, natural, and monumental spaces, its willingness to cede certain passages to secondary characters, and above all its way of infusing the present with the shadows of Vietnam’s fraught past upend its quotidian foundation and lend it an almost dreamlike energy.

For full-on dreaminess, however, look no further than Anna Cornudella’s feature debut The Human Hibernation, which, as it happens, won the FIPRESCI Prize in Berlin. Filmed in Cornudella’s native Spain but featuring English dialogue, the film, co-written by Cornudella and Lluís Sellarès, imagines an alternative to—or perhaps a speculative result of—the Anthropocene, with a small clan of humans in identical coveralls living close to nature, inhabiting man-made spaces turned derelict, sleeping away the coldest months of the year, and waking to a world in which much of what we take for granted is swathed in awe and mystery. I found the film’s hushed air and Beckett-like minimalism woozily seductive. It was bitterly cold out the night I saw The Human Hibernation, and while seated in the cocoon-like confines of Cinema Moderne, I may have drifted off for a spell at one point. The fact that I’m honestly not sure is, I believe, a testament to Cornudella’s control of her film’s sleepy ambiance.

Less ambitious, yet equally confident in its command of tone, writer-director Devin Shears’ Toronto-set feature debut Cherub is a rigorously cozy character study invested in the nature of seeing and being seen. It follows Harvey, a solitary, unassuming laboratory technician and amateur photographer who develops a new sense of self upon discovering a fetish magazine devoted to images of men who share his corpulent, furry physique. Harvey seems not to identify as a bear—in fact, he doesn’t seem to be gay—but Shears’ big-hearted, small-scale tale of self-actualization and body positivity takes an expansive attitude toward queerness. Almost entirely devoid of onscreen dialogue, the film has an exceedingly simple plot, employs a paucity of cuts, stages fantasy sequences that are, amusingly, only slightly fantastical, and shifts between a fairly small number of locations so as to emphasize Harvey’s routines and habits. Cherub is soft and endearing and its low-key approach to storytelling reminded me of the work of Uruguayan director Federico Vieroj, whose quirkily poetic, typically small-scale comedies, such as A Useful Life and The Apostate, are precisely the sort of films that depend on the festival circuit for exposure.

The final FNC selection I’d like to showcase here is Argentine director Federico Luis’ Simón of the Mountain—and to say anything about the film necessitates a notable spoiler. The titular protagonist (Lorenzo Ferro, who, along with the film’s ensemble, earned a well-deserved acting award) is a 21-year-old who lives with his mother in an unnamed, desolate-looking place where he works for his mother’s boyfriend’s moving company. Yet his employment, like so many aspects of his life, is kept hidden from everyone in the milieu he frequents: Simón spends nearly all his time with a group of disabled people—and, while in their company, he falsely presents himself as a disabled person.

It’s been a very long time since I saw Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, but my memory of that film is strong enough for me to assure you that Simón of the Mountain, while certainly provocative, audacious, even upsetting, is a far more sensitive study of the fluctuating social and psychological boundaries that divide those categorized as disabled and those who seek to join their ranks. To the film’s benefit, it’s never entirely clear what motivates Simón’s charade, although it may be some combination of a desire for camaraderie with those he deems as freer or more innocent and sheer opportunism: there is a memorable, unnervingly funny scene, loosely inspired by Luis’ own experience, in which Simón attempts to get into the movies for free by claiming he misplaced the certificate that confirms his disability status. The film begins and ends with Simón being asked a series of questions about himself, which prompts one to wonder if all this clearly troubled young man really seeks is a chance to speak on his own behalf, to determine his identity on his own terms. My hope is that this remarkable film, which took home the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes, will get seen by many people, including those with a personal stake in the subject matter, and strike up a difficult, but necessary conversation.