MONTREAL — After decades on St. Laurent Boulevard, the 38th Festival du nouveau cinéma released its 2009 lineup on Tuesday at its new downtown digs.

Now headquartered in a University of Quebec at Montreal pavilion, the FNC was forced to move from its former home at the Ex-Centris theatre complex after its owner, Daniel Langlois, decided to transform his property into a performing arts centre.

But cinephiles and FNC co-director Claude Chamberlan are celebrating this week after the City of Montreal approved the construction of a new independent theatre complex as part of a downtown revitalization project. The new venue will include a permanent location for Cinéma Parallèle, the non-profit art-house cinema Chamberlan founded which was housed within Ex-Centris.

‘Loosing Ex-Centris was a regression. And it’s important to have a space for the festival. We need a place in Montreal to present international films,’ a beaming Chamberlan told Playback Daily. It remains unknown when the new complex will be completed.

The festival, which runs from Oct. 7-18, will open with Les Dames en bleu (Ladies in Blue), a documentary by Claude Demers about the adoring middle-aged female fans of popular Quebec crooner Michel Louvain.

FNC will also include the Quebec premiere of Taqwacore, The Birth of Punk Islam, a doc about the Muslim punk rock scene produced by EyeSteelFilms and directed by Omar Majeed. ‘There is a lot of young Muslims who find the conservative parts of their religion hard to bare. I wanted to explore that,’ says Majeed, who was born in Ontario but has lived in Pakistan.

The festival also has a new sponsor, Quebecor, which is behind a new $15,000 prize in the international category. Although Quebecor president Pierre Karl Péladeau is best known as a tabloid and TV mogul, he is also a supporter of independent cinema, says Chamberlan. He funds the World Film Festival as well as Elephant, an archive of Quebec classic films. ‘I proposed that he do something for contemporary cinema, for the new generation,’ says the festival co-director, adding that the media mogul offered his support with ‘no control over festival content.’

The festival will also screen Antichrist by Lars von Trier, Broken Embraces by Pedro Almodóvar and PilgrIMAGE by Canadian filmmakers Peter and Mira Wintonick

Short films at FNC will include Peter Mettler’s Petropolis, about the Alberta tar sands, and Guy Maddin’s Night Mayor.

The festival will also feature a retrospective of Jane Campion’s films and a spotlight on German filmmaker Andreas Dresen (Grill Point) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.