2023-09-10 10:14:21
The Francophonie is carving out a prominent place this year at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the first weekend sees a succession of numerous French-language works, including several highly anticipated Quebec films.
According to the festival program, 43 French-language films are being presented this year on the screens of the Queen City, and the Quebec selection is relatively rich.
Sophie Desmarais congratulates this French-speaking presence. She plays a conductor in Chloé Robichaud’s film, Happy Days. We are still a lot of Quebec ambassadors, she says, citing in particular the presence of films by Sophie Dupuis and Monia Chokri. Because the issue of language is always relevant, according to her.
It remains an effort of resistance to maintain it, to keep it, to enrich it, to supervise it because yes it is threatened, that’s for sure.
She adds that working in French also means avoiding an exodus of Quebec talent, both in front of and behind the camera, to Hollywood.
“It’s a source of pride to be able to work in my language,” she says. She nevertheless regrets that French-speaking films are more difficult to export and sell.
Another Quebec film premiering this weekend: the feature film SOLOby Sophie Dupuis, a toxic love story between two men in the industry drag from Montreal.
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Sophie Dupuis, director of the film SOLO, with the actor who plays the main role, Théodore Pellerin.
Photo: Radio-Canada / Rozenn Nicolle
For the director, French is obvious and although she sometimes hesitates to give in to the sirens of English, she claims: I am from Quebec, I grew up in a small region in Abitibi and French is my language, my way of expressing myself, my world.
It’s about participating in my culture, ultimately. And that’s very important to me.
TIFF has a role to play in this Canadian ecosystem and its teams are aware of it. Andréa Picard, curator at the festival, underlines that the challenge of the organization is not the lack of productions, but rather the opposite: There are films which are in competition with others and we do not have to choose between two presentations during the day, but ten.
Varied programming
The French-speaking world is not confined to one genre of cinema. Of course, TIFF is always proud to show the works that have contributed to the rise of French cinema on the international scene throughout history, this year presenting a new restoration of Crazy Love by Jacques Rivette, icon of the New Wave of the 1960s.
TIFF pursues this mission throughout the year, as evidenced by the programming in March of a cycle around new Quebec cinema in which the Toronto public was able to discover or rediscover Sébastien Pilote, Sophie Deraspe and already , Chloé Robichaud who presented her film Paysreleased in 2016.
The program is very varied: sensory exploration with Mademoiselle Kenopsia by Denis Côté to the social drama with Building 5 from Ladj Ly through experimental cinema with Orlando, my political biography by Paul B. Preciado.
Quebec film critic Elijah Baron, visiting the festival as a member of the jury for the critics’ prize, highlights this variety in the choice of productions on display: There is a great diversity of genres, we can see stories immigration like Rubut also more playful films, like Humanist vampire seeking consenting suicide.
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Film critic Elijah Baron is at TIFF to award the FIPRESCI prize, an award given by the International Federation of Film Critics.
Photo : Radio-Canada / Alexis Raymon
History has made French a common language
The festival is an important platform for launching a film on the North American continent.
The Unifrance organization, which aims to develop French cinema, is working hard to pull out all the stops by bringing in well-known French talents around the forty productions it supports.
In recent days on King Street West we were able to meet Ladj Ly who came to present Building 5 world premiere; Justine Triet, crowned with her Palme d’Or won at the Cannes Film Festival with Anatomy of a fall in May; but also Pio Marmaï who comes to defend on the international market the latest comedy from the duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, A difficult yearone of the only films that talks about ecology at TIFF.
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Justine Triet’s film, “Anatomy of a Fall”, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, is showing at TIFF.
Photo: Courtesy: TIFF
From Burkina Faso to Quebec via France and Morocco, several dozen French-speaking productions are screened at the festival. The language is sometimes mixed with others like Bamiléké in Mambar Pierrette by Rosine Mbakam who recounts the daily life of a single mother from Douala, or the Creole in Carnival by Henri Pardo who looks back on the arrival in Canada of a young Haitian and his family in 1975.
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One of the films that is causing a sensation on the screens of the Queen City this year is Sira, by Burkinabe filmmaker Apolline Traoré. In his work which looks at the situation of the inhabitants of the Sahel facing terrorism, we hear a myriad of languages including English and Fulani, but French remains a widely used language.
For the director, it is obvious to use it since in West Africa, almost everyone speaks French, a heritage which today allows us to be able to understand each other between different ethnic groups.
Whether it is a tool of advocacy, the trace of a colonial past or the natural language of expression of artists, French has had the heyday of TIFF and continues to shine in the city’s cinemas, during the festival and beyond.
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