A film about a festival?

That’s what René Rozon, the founder and director of Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art, received as a gift from French filmmaker Alain Fleischer (pictured) on the event’s 30th anniversary.

And Rozon told Playback Daily that Fleischer’s festival essay, Une idée folle – Un hommage au FIFA, is suitably named.

“I was asked how I came about producing this festival. And I responded, ‘A crazy idea,’” Rozon explained midway through the fest’s March 15 to 25 edition.

Fleischer’s essay on FIFA’s landmark year features a host of talking heads interviewed in Montreal and Paris and who, like the filmmaker himself, have seen their work featured by Rozon and his programmers over the last three decades.

They include art-world personalities like Phyllis Lambert, Nathalie Bondil, Michel Dallaire, Jules Maeght and Lorraine Pintal.

In all, 232 films from 27 countries will unspool at FIFA.

Canadian films screening in competition include Guillaume Paquin’s Aux limites de la scène, about a new generation of Montreal dance choreographers, Chaorismatique — David Altmejd, sculpteur, by Rénald Bellemare, and Jill Sharpe’s Bone Wind Fire, a film that examines the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Carr and Frida Kahlo.

Also screening in Montreal is Luc Bourdon’s Un musée dans la ville, about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Peter Raymont and Michele Hozer’s West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson, a portrait of the enigmatic Group of Seven artist.