Montreal: When Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma held its final press conference on Oct. 23, it brought an end to the city’s strangest fall festival season ever.

And that the FNC seemed to emerge as the most successful of Montreal’s three major film festivals only made things more odd, given that it has the smallest budget of the three. Both earlier events, the World Film Festival and the inaugural edition of the New Montreal FilmFest, suffered from troubling audience numbers and thumbs-down reviews of their respective programming lineups. When the NMFF wrapped, event organizers took the drastic step of canceling their final press conference, so as to avoid any further embarrassing questions.

By contrast, FNC founder and chief programmer Claude Chamberlan was glowing at his Oct. 23 awards luncheon, clearly proud of his 11-day event’s series of sold-out houses and generally positive reviews from the local dailies and weeklies. Chamberlan made the rather surreal celebratory move of arranging for a mechanical frog to sing What a Wonderful World at the luncheon, reflecting his own elation at the FNC’s 34th edition.

‘This was a super-duper festival,’ Chamberlan gushed in an interview after the luncheon. ‘It never stopped. Things went beautifully. Given the film noir scenario we faced, that our existence was threatened this year, it has made everything sweeter.’

Chamberlan concedes that much of his event’s success is due to its calendar placement. ‘Most of the great films play at either Venice or Toronto,’ he says. ‘We’re here in October, and are able to pick and choose which films we want to screen. It works perfectly for the eclectic character of our festival.’

The NMFF also unfolded after Venice and Toronto, but that event’s chief programmer, Moritz de Hadeln, had already stated publicly that he did not want to rerun many titles from earlier festivals. That left him with a dearth of higher-profile titles to choose from, and allowed Chamberlan to bolster his lineup with entries – Capote for one – that were still humming with the buzz generated at TIFF weeks earlier.

After the fest, Chamberlan and his team handed out a series of awards. Bohdan Slama’s Czech Republic/German coproduction Something Like Happiness won the Louve d’Or Jury Prize for Best Feature. The Radio-Canada Best Screenplay Award went to Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iranian entry Iron Island, while Radio-Canada’s People’s Choice Award went to German Gutierrez’s Quebec feature Qui a tiré sur mon frère?

The National Film Board innovation award went to Edouard Salier’s French film Flesh, with special mention going to Kankuro Kudo’s feature Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims (Japan) and Shinya Tsukamoto’s short Haze. Montreal director Robert Morin won the Main Prize, another jury prize, for Petit Pow! Pow! Noel, while the Grand Prix went to Ghassan Fayad’s City Speak (Quebec), and the Banff New Media Institute People’s Choice Award went to Brett Gaynor’s Opensource Cinema (Quebec).

Chamberlan also announced the dates for the 35th edition of FNC: Oct. 12-22, 2006.

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