Neige

"Carl Brown makes celluloid dance. [His] new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you'll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir ('Black Snow'), a name that conjures up Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the First World War, the piece is a visual feast. It opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, and then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images. Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometimes refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them." (Thomas Hirschmann)

After winning a scholarship to study in France, a young Senegalese man returns home and questions his experience and his future, with honesty, courage and humor.

Mony, fiancée of Jacques, adopts the child he had with Gisèle. When she wants to take it back, she gives it back to him and pushes Jacques to marry her.

Abandoned by her husband Marc, Thérèse Romanay cheats on him with André Norans. When Romanay finds out, he drives her away. She runs away with her lover. But, during a mountain excursion, Norans is killed and Thérèse is herself seriously injured. But she recovers. The husband then forgives the unfaithful wife, and the couple reunites.

In a city covered by snow, the young Paul lives alone with his mother since his father left. Not far away, lives an old man of foreign origin with whom Paul has a strange relationship.

A burly mustached man breaks into a seemingly abandoned house to escape a blizzard.

This feature documentary zooms in on Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges borough, where over 75 ethnic groups live side by side in a dizzying swirl of sound and colour. One day, filmmaker Lucie Lachapelle began knocking on the doors that isolated her from her neighbours. The result is a vibrant film about freedom and uprootedness set to urban music composed by Montreal jazz artist Harold Faustin.

En Attendant la Neige is a parody of violence. Paco Sanchez and Dede Gallice are childhood friends who share a passion for karate. When forced to face Dede in a decisive match, Paco refuses to fight his best friend. Dede becomes the champion by default, but he cannot get over the bitterness of this inglorious victory. Paco moves on with his life. Unjustly accused of a robbery and chased by his employer, Dede unwillingly drags his wife Claire and Paco into a frantic nocturnal escape through Paris. Emotions culminate during an apocalyptic game where imagination and reality blend. The film tries to reflect certain social questions of our time using common images.

A robbery, a new language, an inner odyssey.

Pierre Huyghe's work questions how diverse languages can apply to the same reality. In his short film Blanche-Neige Lucie (Snow White Lucie), Huyghe tells the story of Lucie Dolene who sang in the French version of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The film shows an aged Lucie humming the famous song while an interview with her runs as subtitles to the images. This mirroring of dubbing and translation serves as the vehicle for Huyghe's questioning of multiple identities and the ideal of translating a meaning to create a universal image.

Lucie has just started school, full of questions. If life were just a little more like in the fairy tales ...