The National Film Board of Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) present their first-ever co-production, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord. An ambitious installation created by Daily tous les jours, the work is part of Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything – Une brèche en toute chose, a major multidisciplinary show at the MAC featuring 20 works by 40 artists from 10 countries, inspired by the life, work and themes of the eponymous Montreal literary icon. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, whose title is the first line of Cohen’s anthemic song “Hallelujah,” is both an installation and an online experience (asecretchord.com, publicly accessible as of November 9, the exhibition’s opening date). This unique participatory experience seeks to reveal the invisible vibration uniting people around the world listening to “Hallelujah” at the same time, as real-time user data representing these listeners is transformed into a virtual choir of humming voices that participants can hum along with.
Starting November 5, Eoin Duffy’s award-winning National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animated short I Am Here will be streamed free-of-charge across a range of online portals, as this flash-animated 2D short premieres simultaneously at Cartoon Brew, NFB.ca, Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook.
To commemorate the Centennial of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, the Vimy Foundation and the National Film Board of Canada have partnered to launch a new original short film entitled Return to Vimy, written, directed and produced by Denis McCready.
The National Film Board of Canada congratulates animator and frequent NFB creative collaborator Michèle Cournoyer on winning the 2017 Prix Albert-Tessier—making her the first female animation filmmaker to receive this honour. The award is being presented to Cournoyer today, during a formal ceremony at the Parliament Building in Quebec City. Quebec’s highest honour in cinema, the award recognizes her body of work and her significant contribution to filmmaking in the province. The Prix Albert-Tessier is one of 14 Prix du Québec awarded every year.
The National Film Board of Canada returns to the Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (FICFA) this year with five films, including a preview screening of the director’s cut of 1999 (Parabola Films, in co-production with Beauvoir Films and the NFB), a feature documentary by Acadian director Samara Grace Chadwick. A collective essay on how grief is internalized, the film focuses on an inspiring group of people who break their long silence 16 years after a wave of teenage suicides at a Moncton-area high school. This screening will take place at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 20, at the Capitol Theatre, with the director in attendance. Also screening at this year’s festival, in competition, is Luc Bourdon’s feature documentary La part du diable (The Devil’s Share). This will be the film’s premiere screening in Acadie, following its world premiere in a packed theatre at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma, where it received a standing ovation. The film offers a new and distinctive perspective on Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1970s, using clips from NFB films. Three NFB shorts will also be screened at the festival, as part of its special animation program: Éléonore Goldberg’s Mon yiddish papi (My Yiddish Papi) (Picbois Productions/NFB); Patrick Péris’ Nadine; and Matthew Rankin’s TESLA: LUMIÈRE MONDIALE (THE TESLA WORLD LIGHT).
Financial crises happen regularly—and repeat themselves. The effects of the 2008 crisis are still with us today, yet the average person still has a limited understanding of economic phenomena. Many think these concepts are too complicated and aren’t relevant to them. This is exactly the sort of thinking that prompted the National Film Board of Canada to produce How to Create a Financial Crisis, an interactive documentary in the form of a text-message conversation with Léon Courville—a professor of economics, former President and Chief Operating Officer of National Bank of Canada, and renowned popularizer of economic science. As a former key player at one of the country’s major financial institutions, Courville offers exclusive insights into the mechanisms of financial crises and the human behaviour behind them. Gaining a better understanding of the complex world of finance and having tools to better access it are important as we approach November, Financial Literacy Month in Canada. This free interactive experience is optimized for mobile phones and accessible on tablets and desktop computers, presenting its complex subject in a dynamic, colourful and entertaining format. How to Create a Financial Crisis was created by a high-profile multidisciplinary team that brought together Courville, writer-creator Charles Trahan, illustrator Katy Lemay, and digital design studio Folklore. The experience was produced at the NFB by Louis-Richard Tremblay.
Montreal, October 24, 2017 — The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and the National Film Board (NFB) present Kushapetshekan / Kosapitcikan – A Glimpse Into the Other World, an immersive installation by Atikamekw artists Eruoma Awashish and Meky Ottawa, and Innu artist Jani Bellefleur-Kaltush. For the MMFA presentation, the trio created a complete version of a prototype developed in 2016 in the creative lab DÉRANGER, an NFB project in collaboration with Montreal’s OBORO media artists’ centre and Wapikoni. This presentation is part of the Artist. Woman. Indigenous. cycle at the Museum, devoted to female Indigenous artists.
The National Film Board of Canada and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival announced on October 19 that the 360-degree video experience by Ahnahktsipiitaa (Colin Van Loon) is the 2017 winner of the NFB/imagineNATIVE Interactive Partnership, which aims to support new forms of Indigenous artistic expression by offering Canadian Indigenous artists an opportunity to create audacious, innovative and socially relevant new-media works.
The National Film Board of Canada and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) are launching Déroutes, un voyage sonore au cœur de Montréal, a free app for iOS that features French-speaking new Montrealers discussing their first experiences riding the Montreal Metro. These first-person accounts of Montreal are sometimes funny, often touching, and always eminently human. The app was created by eight students from UQAM through Jeunes Pousses, a nine-week interactive apprenticeship program that had them working with the NFB’s Interactive Studio to develop an interactive narrative project in which audio was central to the creative process. These students were the first group to complete the program. The call for applications for the 2018 edition is also being launched today.
Fifteen National Film Board of Canada works will be shown at the 20th-anniversary edition of the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) (November 9-19), including three new NFB feature docs making their Quebec premiere after acclaimed film festival tours: Alanis Obomsawin’s Our People Will Be Healed, Charles Officer’s Unarmed Verses, and Tasha Hubbard’s Birth of a Family.
The National Film Board of Canada is honouring the memory and contributions to Quebec cinema of Jean Roy, a cameraman, director of photography, producer, and director who passed away this week at the age of 88. He founded the NFB’s French-language independent filmmaker assistance program, ACIC, in 1973.
The National Film Board of Canada and the Sommets du cinéma d’animation are joining forces to present a series of Artists’ Talks at the Cinémathèque québécoise, beginning Friday, October 27, with Éléonore Goldberg and her film Mon yiddish papi (My Yiddish Papi). In the months to come, animation filmmakers Matthew Rankin, Dominic Etienne Simard, Alex Boya and Torill Kove will take turns giving the public behind-the-scenes glimpses into their latest productions. Audiences will have a rare opportunity to explore these artists’ creative processes and talk to them about their approach, inspiration and techniques.
The National Film Board of Canada returns to the Festival du cinéma international en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (FCIAT) this year with four films, including two world premieres: the animated short Un printemps (Winds of Spring) (NFB), by Keyu Chen, and the feature documentary Labrecque, une caméra pour la mémoire (ACPAV/NFB), by Michel La Veaux. The former tells the tale of a young girl who, driven by the irrepressible need for self-fulfillment, dreams of leaving the family nest, while the latter captures the great director and cinematographer Jean-Claude Labrecque’s passionate, humanistic perspective on the films, culture, and history of Quebec. Two other animated shorts round out the NFB slate for the festival: Diane Obomsawin’s J’aime les filles (I Like Girls) (NFB) and La dent (The Tooth) (Canal+/Sacrebleu Productions/NFB), directed by Guy Delisle. The FCIAT takes place in Rouyn-Noranda and runs October 28 to November 2, 2017.
The National Film Board of Canada’s Ontario Studio in Toronto is now in production on Throat, a visionary feature documentary on the powerful and uncompromising Inuk artist/activist Tanya Tagaq, co-created by Chelsea McMullan (My Prairie Home) and Tagaq, and produced by Lea Marin and executive produced by Anita Lee for the NFB.
Starting Saturday, October 21, Winnipeg audiences will have the chance to take in Marie Clements’ musical documentary The Road Forward on the big screen, as the Cinematheque presents screenings of the National Film Board of Canada feature until October 29.