Montreal 2008

Abstract

MORAL TALES FROM THE MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL The Competition selection of the 32nd Montreal International Film Festival (21 August – 1 September 2008) featured twenty fiction films, at least one third of which were well-crafted exemplars of mainstream "cinema of quality" in the best sense of the term. In a way, films like Faubourg 36, Farewell Gulsary, Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann, The Necessities of Life, and to a great extent, Theo's Voyage, seek to update or popularize the stylistic or genre traditions they are made in, whether national or international, without shunning from emotions that often venture into the melodramatic and even the sentimental, or from predictable plot twists meant to keep the viewers both on edge and to please their instinct for imitation, and of anticipated reversals and recognition as Aristotle would have it. Beneath and beyond the emotional excess, displayed in these films, "there lies," as...