Montreal 2006

FIPRESCI Prize winner: "A Long Walk"

The World Film Festival, headed by Serge Losique, celebrated this time its 31st year. It offered a huge diversity of recent world cinema, culminating in two competitive sections, for world cinema, and for first films. Last year, the event lost some sponsors, however, it continued this year as if nothing had happened, and maintained its role as one of the leading festivals on the North American continent. The critics forming our jury awarded our prize to a Japanese film: A Long Walk by Eiji Okuda. The long walk is undertaken by a retired high school director who makes friends with a five-year-old girl, as lonesome and dissociated as he is.
Montreal World Film Festival, August 24 to September 4, 2006: www.ffm-montreal.org
Details of the FIPRESCI prize

Reports:

A Long Walk to Love. Ossama Abdel-Fattah Rezk finds Eiji Okuda's A Long Walk emotionally rewarding and, although sad, ultimately optimistic. Read the review

End Games. Yek Bous-e Kouchoulou appreciates the subtle profundities of Bahman Farmanara's A Little Kiss, a sensitive study of old age, homeland and self-discovery. Read the review

Landscapes of The Soul. Maria Kornatowska takes A Journey to the Edge of the World with the leading character in Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf's "deeply personal and strongly visual film". Read the review

A Memory of Forgotten Children. Francine Laurendeau is very impressed by Benoit Pilon's Nestor et les oubliés, an admirably understated but emotionally powerful documentary of a terrible period of Montreal's relatively recent past. Read the review

Short Cuts. Kirill Razlogov took time away from feature films to discover a richly rewarding selection of short films, too often neglected by critics at festivals. Read the report

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