Montreal: Four Canadian features are entered in official competition at this year’s 24th edition of the Montreal World Film Festival. The early assessment indicates a promising year for the fiapf-sanctioned competition, with 22 films from 15 countries vying for the festival’s top award – the Grand Prix des Ameriques.

wff industry program highlights include the Aug. 29 Symposium 2000, ‘Is There a Future for National Cinema?’ as well as tributes to Italian cinema and the great neo-realist director Francesco Rosi, Chinese movie star Gong Li, Iranian director and Palme d’Or winner Abbas Kiarostami, the great Indian actor Om Puri, and a special screening salute to the legendary German film studio Babelsberg.

This year’s wff program includes 360 films from 55 countries, including 216 features, many of which are world or North American premieres.

The program also includes a swank luncheon tribute to Famous Players (Aug. 29) on the occasion of its 80th anniversary. fp president John Bailey will attend the event, organized by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and the Montreal International Film, TV and Video Market in association with distributor Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm.

wff headquarters are again located in the downtown Wyndham Hotel.

The festival opens Aug. 25 with the North American premiere of the huge French box-office hit Le Gout des Autres (Films Seville), directed by actress Agnes Jaoui. The fest closes Sept. 4 with the world premiere of Australian director Dien Perry’s Bootmen, the story of a factory worker and his dreams of tap-dancing glory.

Canadian movies in competition include Denis Villeneuve’s Maelstrom, a surreal tale of redemption (Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm); Michel Jette’s Hochelaga, a biker/street punk exploration (Cinema Libre); Claude Demers’ L’Invention de l’Amour, a modern story of unrequited love (Remstar Distribution); and from b.c, Bruce Spangler’s feature film debut Protection, an intimate, fact-based portrait of a young social worker facing her own crisis.

Competition entries creating a measure of excitement include Jaoui’s social comedy and directorial debut Le Gout des Autres; Chilean director Raoul Ruiz’s philosophical fantasy Combat d’Amour en Songe; French director Claude Chabol’s 52nd movie, Merci pour le chocolat (Nightcap), starring actress Isabelle Huppert; and wff favorite, Argentinean director Eliseo Subiela’s The Adventures of God.

Also vying for the Grand Prix des Ameriques are Chinese director Sun Zhou’s Breaking the Silence, starring Gong Li; Japanese director Shun Nakahara’s Colorful, based on the Eto Mori novel; and u.s. playwright Kenneth Longergan’s feature You Can Count On Me.

Other Grand Prix hopefuls include French director Benoit Jacquot’s Sade, a delirious retelling of the adventures of the infamous marquis, starring Daniel Auteuil, who is also slated to attend this year’s festival; Australian director Paul Cox’s latest, Innocence; Italian director Pupi Avati’s historical drama La Vie Degli Angeli (Midsummer Night Dance); and two Iranian films, Bahman Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Fragance of Jasmine and Seyyed Reza Mir-karimi’s The Child and the Soldier.

NFB @ WFF

The National Film Board has a major presence at this year’s wff, with four shorts in official competition and 10 more entries in the festival’s Panorama Canada section.

Shorts include Janet Perlman’s dazzling animated exploration of power, Bully Dance; Paul Driessen’s multi-screen animation take on a little boy’s fantasy world, The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg; Wayne Traudt’s celebration of movement and life, BODy RHyTHM/Cadences; and Claude Cloutuer’s absurdist animation short, From the Big-Bang to Tuesday Morning.

New nfb documentaries on the program include:

* Colin Low’s Moving Pictures, an exploration of war and the media’s images of war researched and produced over many years (producer Mark Zannis);

* Penelope Buitenhuis’ Tokyo Girls, a candid account of four young Canadian women working in high-class Japanese nightclubs (producer Gillian Kovanic);

* Jeannette Loakman’s documentary Slippery Blisses, about the sensations and science of kissing (producer Silva Basmajian);

* Karen Shopsowitz’s My Father’s Camera, a ‘home-movie’ journey across North America exploring the early days of amateur filmmaking (produced by Silva Basmajian);

* Jean Marc Lariviere’s Les Chasseurs d’ombre, a family chronicle/travelogue of the Millennium year solar eclipse (produced by Yves Bisaillon);

* Michel Jones’ Kim Campbell Through the Looking Glass, a frank portrait of Canada’s first female prime minister (producer Silva Basmajian); and

* Bay Weyman’s and Luis Garcia’s doc Spirits of Havana, an exploration of Cuban music and society as seen through the eyes of Canadian jazz artist Jane Bunnett (producer Peter Starr).

As in past years, the nfb will present the Norman McLaren Award to the director of the best overall production at the Canadian Student Film Festival.

Forty films are programmed in the WFF-Panorama Canada section, including five indie-produced features and 27 shorts. Six of the new shorts were directed and produced by students at Institut National de l’Image et du Son, Quebec’s advanced film school.

Canadian features, a number of which are world premieres, include Jeff Beesley’s Borderline Normal, ‘an anthem for the real victims of divorce;’ Derek Diorio’s House of Luk, a fortune-cookie story of three lovable losers; Arne Olsen’s Here’s to Life, a tale about a retentive retirement home manager undone by a determined old man; Jon Einarsson Gustafsson’s Kanadiana, a ‘winter in Winnipeg’ drama about an ex-con’s ‘one last job;’ and Richard Story’s Echo Lake, one man’s haunting journey across time and place in search of a lost brother.

Symposium 2000

Symposium 2000 on Aug. 29 is being organized under the broad theme Cultural Diversity and Market Globalization, with the focus on the financing and distribution of feature films.

At press time, participants included journalist Pierre Bourgault; Robert Pilon, executive secretary of the Canadian Coalition for Cultural Diversity; Claude Veillet, president of Telefiction; and Geoffrey Gilmore, codirector of the Sundance Film Festival.

Also participating are Mareille Paulus, executive secretary at Eurimages; Pierre-Henri Deleau, exec director of fipa; Jose Carlos Avellar, producer/distrib at Rio Filme; and Roger Frappier, president of Max Films.

The acct/wff market program’s hosts are tv journalists Simon Durivage and Michaelle Jean.

Other highlights on this year’s wff screening program include Dominik Moll’s comedy noir Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien, Olivier Assayas’ Destinees Sentimentales, Volker Schondorff’s The Legends of Rita, Irish director Pat Murphy’s historical-literary drama Nora, Stephen Hopkins’ u.s./France thriller Under Suspicion, and David Mamet’s latest, State and Main, starring Alec Baldwin, Charles Durning and Sarah Jessica Parker. *

-www.ffm-montreal.org