Le huitième étage, jours de révolte
The mission of the Centre d'art et essai de la Cinémathèque québécoise (CAECQ) is to primary program Quebec-made documentaries and independent fiction, as well as international documentaries, animated and foreign films, while encouraging opportunities for meetings between the public and the artists. Its programming is presented in conjunction with the Cinémathèque québécoise’s under the label New releases.
Le huitième étage, jours de révolte is a film between reality and extravagance. A hybrid work mixing autobiography and fiction, in the style of literary autofiction, about one of the most singular characters of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ): Jacques Lanctôt. Le huitième étage chronicles the life of a man who returns to a place that welcomed and sheltered him during his exile in the 1970s: the eighth-floor room of the Hotel Nacional in Cuba. A sort of biopic of a memorable stay by a man in forced retirement, on a Caribbean island, in an enchanted castle where he could only live in passionate delirium.
Pedro Ruiz
Pedro Ruiz is a photojournalist and filmmaker whose work includes Animal Tropical à Montréal, a portrait of writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. His film La dérive douce d'un enfant de Petit-Goâve, plunges us straight into the wild imagination of writer Dany Laferrière (Audience Award at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal, 2009). In 2012, he directed the film Philémon Chante Habana, an intimate odyssey of singer-songwriter Philémon Cimon, followed in 2019 by Sur les toits Havane, a dazzling, poetic journey featuring the people who inhabit the Havana canopy.
