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Article: Eclecticism triumphs at the montreal world film festival. (Communiques).
- Article from:
- Cineaste
- Article date:
- December 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Cineaste Publishers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To usher in its twenty-fifth anniversary, Montreal's World Film Festival opened with a film--L'Ange de goudron--by a Montreal native, Denis Chouinard. For a festival occasionally berated by the local press for ignoring Quebecois talent, this was a decision of strategic, as well as of esthetic, importance. Whatever the opening night audience (which proved polite if not particularly demonstrative) actually thought of Chouinard's political melodrama, no one could deny that it addressed questions of Canadian national and ethnic identity. The film's opening scenes depict the travails of an Algerian immigrant, Abmed Kasmi, whose loyalty to his adopted country includes a ...