The 39th edition of the
Montreal World Film Festival will take place from August 27th to September 7th 2015, at the Imperial (
1430 Bleury - Metro Place des Arts) and Quartier Latin (
350 rue Emery - Berri-UQAM) theatres.
Tickets will be available from August 22 at noon at the offices of the Imperial (CI) and Quartier Latin (QL) theatres, as well as online through the Admission Network website. Individual tickets are $ 10, Passports are $ 120 and Cinephile Card is $ 250. Booklets of 10 coupons redeemable against individual tickets are available for $ 70. More details on the festival website:
www.ffm-montreal.org.
This year there was no real press conference about the programming and instead the festival unveiled the line-up of films in the
World Competition and the First Films Competition through press releases and a
virtual press conference where both domestic and international media could simultaneously participate in an online Q&A session. So far, since then, the information has been trickling down little by little and we don't know much about the festival programming. They said that “A digital age requires a digital solution,” but I guess it has also a lot to do with the lack of subsidies and the resulting reduced staff. I don't mind a little austerity as long at it gets the festival going and brings us the diversified, quality cinema the festival is renown for.
We know that, this year,
a record number of short films were submitted; that
the opening movie will be Muhammad, the latest film by renowned Iranian director Majid Majidi; that this year's festival will offer movies from over 86 countries; that the
competition line-up will includes 26 Feature films from 31 countries for the World Competition, plus 25 more movies for the First Feature Competition, and that both competitions will include 36 World Premieres; we know the composition of both the
jury for the Grand Prize of the Americas and the
jury for the First Feature Prize; finally, a couple of days after the virtual press conference, the festival announced that twenty-four features from a score of countries will be shown in the
World Greats (out of competition) category.
Here our interest is mostly with the
Japanese movies. At first, with the
festival press releases and an article in the
august edition of Coco Montreal, we determined that the festival would show at least fourteen Japanese movies. However, with the release of
the schedule we astonishingly discovered that a record-breaking number of Japanese movies will be shown this year:
seventeen (twenty-one if we count a Liberian movie with a Japanese director, a four-minute short and two documentaries)! See
the films index for details. (updated 2015-08-21)
Be careful, the schedule of some movies has changed (updated 2015-08-28).
Coco Montreal have put a more detailed article (this time with english and french translation) on the festival's Japanese movies in their September issue (available both in the
issuu.com flash version and on their
Facebook page). [updated 2015-09-01]
You can now read some comments about the Festival's Japanese movies (in french) in the first part of the article by my esteemed colleague Claude R. Blouin
on the blog Shomingeki. [updated 2015-09-03]
You will find,
after the jump, a list of all those movies (plus a few useful links — of course, more details and links will be added
as the information become available):
