Archives in the Hands of Filmmakers
To coincide with the exceptional circumstances of hosting the annual congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), we are offering a program highlighting the strengths of our collections and our mandate: animated film gems, world premiere commissioned works, newly restored features, documentaries devoted to heritage questions and the reuse of archives.
The Cinémathèque québécoise commissioned six artists (from both the experimental and animated film scenes) to create a short film using unselected Soviet films from a donation by collector François Lemai. Recomposing images, manipulating shots to remind us of their plastic value, producing a discourse that resonates with the approach of the artists invited... We invite you to discover the world premiere of these singular and powerful approaches.
“If I take Myriade as an example, I knew very early on that I wanted to create a work of portraiture, as cinema is 80-85% portraiture. This led me to look for recurring motifs around this theme. Wasn't it Carl Theodor Dreyer who said that cinema is the art of faces?”
– Serge Clément, interview in Spirale, Summer 2018
“Ushev recomposes and triturates with great aesthetic vigor and panache Eisenstein's The Old and the New, giving this title a new historical dimension, the Old becoming the USSR and the New Putin's Russia.”
– Guillaume Lafleur, Director Diffusion, Programming and Publications
Accompanied by a live musical performance by René Lussier and Robbie Kuster.
“The Austrian-Canadian experimental filmmaker revisits the themes of her recent films (species extinction, the environmental divide), rearranging images from Soviet dystopian fictions.”
– Guillaume Lafleur, Director Diffusion, Programming and Publications
“Entitled Mental Toughness, the filmmaker and performer offers an eminently plastic reworking and alteration of Soviet sports films from the 1980s depicting wrestling and pole vaulting.”
– Guillaume Lafleur, Director Diffusion, Programming and Publications
“With this film, the Bulgarian-Canadian filmmaker returns to the roots of her approach and the cinema of reuse. Once again, the question of the cinematic landscape is at stake, based in part on the reuse of a 35mm print of an incomplete film by Alexandre Sokourov.”
– Guillaume Lafleur, Director Diffusion, Programming and Publications
“An intimate, contemplative film, composed of 65mm landscape rephotographs of some shots from the film Gypsies are Found Near Heaven, by Moldavian-born filmmaker Emil Loteanu.”
– Guillaume Lafleur, Director Diffusion, Programming and Publications
