Montreal: The 18th edition of the International Festival of Films on Art opens with a gala screening of Zhang Yimou’s Turandot in the Forbidden City at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The sprawling, big-budget Chinese adaptation of Puccini’s unfinished opera features music from former mso director Zubin Mehta.

iffa’s program includes 170 titles from 25 countries and runs from March 6-19 in six downtown theatres including the newly expanded Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Goethe Institute and Cinematheque Quebecoise.

Festival director Rene Rozon says five Canadian films are among the more than 40 films from 17 countries entered in the competitive Creative Crossroads section.

Canadian entries include the National Film Board women’s art history doc The Other Side of the Picture, and the Jack Kerouac portrait, A New Kind Of Bohemian. Also on the program is Mai en Decembre, an nfb portrait of Jean-Luc Godard’s unlikely visit to rural Abitibi in the heady protest days of 1968.

This year’s iffa program includes a 15-film tribute marking the 20th anniversary of the Brussels Centre of Films on Art and includes works on or by Matisse, Man Ray, Ionesco, Giacometti and Rubens.

Leo Rice-Barker