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.

Montreal: The second season of The Tournament, CBC’s mockumentary series about children’s hockey and overzealous parents, is shooting in Montreal until Nov. 15.
The 10 x 30 season will continue to follow the Warriors, a fictional team of misfit kids and their obnoxiously ambitious parents and, this year, the producers say that they have an advantage. The hockey strike is over.

Now in its second year as an autumn event, the American Film Market expects toattract a record 7,000 attendees next month, at least 200 of them from Canada.

Montreal: Nominations for the 20th annual Gemeaux Awards for French-language television were unveiled on Oct. 12, with L’Héritière de Grande Ourse, société Radio-Canada’s paranormal mystery program, in the lead with 14 nominations.
Minuit, le soir, Radio-Canada’s drama about the nightlife of an ensemble of adventurous Montrealers, and TVA’s Le Négociateur, a crime drama set in 1970, were a close second, with 11 nominations each.

Montreal: There was no end in sight for Montreal’s bruising three-way film festival war, with the final fest of the season, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, opening with a salvo from none other than auteur Atom Egoyan.

Montreal: Wayne Clarkson feels that Telefilm Canada and SODEC were justified in yanking funding from Montreal’s beleaguered World Film Festival, but says that its intended replacement, the New Montreal FilmFest, will have to report on its attendance figures before it will get a second year of funding.

Montreal: With Bon Cop/Bad Cop, Montreal producer Kevin Tierney (Varian’s War) is hoping to unite Canada’s two linguistic solitudes at the box office. Touted as the first time a Canadian film will be ‘completely bilingual,’ the murder-mystery and cop-buddy flick will attempt to ride the current wave of success in Quebec’s film industry across language lines.

Montreal: If organizers of the New Montreal FilmFest were licking their wounds after their bumpy inaugural edition, Serge Losique was probably savoring the scent of blood.
Losique, after all, had recently suffered setbacks at his own World Film Festival, which ran Aug. 26 to Sept. 5 amid his now-famous war with NMFF, low turnout and, again, bad press.

Montreal: When programming for the 34th Festival du Nouveau Cinéma was unveiled at a press conference on Sept. 27, a group of worn-out journalists looked on. This is, after all, the city’s third film festival in the fall season and, after the rather bruising inaugural edition of the New Montreal FilmFest, the last thing film critics here were eager for was yet another film festival.

Montreal: The good news keeps getting better for the filmmakers behind C.R.A.Z.Y.

While negotiations continued, the war of words between CBC management and employees escalated, as the work stoppage at the network entered its sixth week.

Montreal: La Belle bête, the first adaptation of a novel by acclaimed Quebec writer Marie-Claire Blais, has wrapped in Montreal. The film, also written by Blais, centers on a mother who favors her son while rejecting her daughter.
Appearing are Caroline Dhavernas (Wonderfalls), David La Haye (La Vie avec mon père) and Marc-André Grondin (C.R.A.Z.Y. and one of Playback’s 2005 10 to Watch), with Karim Hussain (Subconscious Cruelty) directing.