Cinemania Film Festival, Montreal, November 1st - 11th

[Al-khiyal]

Cinemania

[Al-khiyal]

November 1, 2007 -- Cinemania began its 13th edition Thursday night with a flutter of stars, flutes of wine and a public screening of Julian Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) at the Imperial Cinema.

Today, the city's only festival devoted to showing French-language films with English subtitles settles into its modest stride with an average of six films a day screening at the Imperial.

This year's event offers 32 films in all through November 11, including five from French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier that form a tribute to his frequent collaborator, the late French actor Philippe Noiret.

One festival film is Swiss, another a Georgian-French co-production, L'Heritage (The Legacy), by Géla Babluani, whose 13 Tzameti russian roulette variation galvanized audiences and critics at Cinemania last year. Babluani will be in to show his new film.

Mehdi Charef's Cartouches Gauloises (Summer of '62) is an Algerian film about the final weeks of French rule there, as seen through the eyes of a child. It is one of a number of films either about kids, or filtered through their lens. Others include Demandez la permission aux enfants! (Kid Power), a French comedy with Sandrine Bonnaire and Anne Parillaud.

At least two films feature adults who behave like kids - director-star Maiwenn Le Besco's semi-autobiographical domestic abuse exposé Pardonnez-moi (Forgive Me); and Joachim Lafosse's harrowing France-Belgium-Luxembourg co-production, Nue Propriété (Private Property), with Isabelle Huppert.

Other festival events include tomorrow afternoon's 3:30 p.m. master class, in which the masterful talker and compulsively curious Tavernier spills a few secrets about his lifetime in the cinema. Ask about his new project, a detective thriller with Tommy Lee Jones set in Louisiana. The class is preceded by an earlier Tavernier police thriller, 1981's Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate), starring Noiret and Huppert, at 1 p.m.

Cinemania festival starts subtitles rolling