Festival du Nouveau Cinéma

Cinema Scout and Purveyor all rolled into one. Inspired by everything for everyone.

His debonair madness as a host-organizer bursts forth in the ’60s with the Tombolas and Love-Ins. Lead vocalist for Les Soeurs de l'Opéra in the era of The Mothers of Invention, he sings Zappa, Jagger and Cocteau and attends John & Yoko’s bed-in.
’67 – The passion for cinema hits hard! With his mentor Dimitri Eipides, he creates an independent, avant-garde, experimental movie theatre—the Underground Film Centre, followed by the mythic Cinéma Parallèle and multimedia shows at its Café Méliès. Then it’s the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative and FilmFilm, distributor for more than 800 films and videos, with tours of indie Quebec/Canadian films to 28 European cities and publishing of film guides and catalogues.
’71 - The amazing Festival du nouveau cinéma is born, and through it he discovers a wealth of auteur filmmakers. After a special FNC program in New York, he creates Check Hit Out and begins specializing in event planning, tributes and retrospectives (Cassavetes, Boris Vian, Warhol, Spike Lee, Greenaway, Gena Rowlands…).
For cinema’s 100th birthday, he concocts his wildest project yet! He wins a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest movie screening of all time: a 250-hour non-stop panorama of films from 1889 to 1992. Around the same time, a woman wins the record for non-stop marathon movie watching: 136 films, 11 days, no sleep.
He directed three strange films, and is a walk-on in movies with Fellini, Pacino, Binamé and Pool. He launches MAGNIFICO, the Al Fresco Summer Film Event: outdoor screenings, underwater (Dive-In), in a bakery and a peep show on chic Saint-Laurent, a boulevard he loves. In a delirious fit of generosity, he pays one hundred people to go see a movie. Impssed, Annie Sprinkle anoints him “Pleasure Activist”. 
’99 – He becomes head programmer at Ex-Centris and programmer at the funky Cinema du Parc. So everyone can join the fun, there’s movie karaoke with some unforgettable performances at CinéOké.
He invents, reinvents, envisions and hands down—in every way imaginable—today’s and tomorrow’s cinema.

Dimitri Eipides studied Literature at the University of San Francisco, and theatre at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.  He is also a graduate of cinema from the London Film School.
In 1971, He co- founded with Claude Chamberlan the Festival du nouveau cinema. This "lifelong" association with the FNC continues until today.  He has taught cinema at Université de Montréal, and in 1988 joined the programming team of the Toronto Film Festival as international programmer. From 1992 to 2005, he organized the "New Horizons" section of the Thessaloniki Film Festival and in 1999, he founded the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival which he directs until now. Later in 2005, he was appointed program director at the International Festival of Reykjavik.
He has participated in international juries of a number of festivals such as Moscow, Istanbul, San Sebastian, Jerusalem etc. In 1999 he was awarded a FIpSCI award for the quality of the program selections in Thessaloniki.  In the past two years he has psented weekly documentary programs on Greek television. In 2005, he was honored by the Iranian Minister of Culture in Tehran, for his contributions to the psentation and promotion of Iranian cinema internationally.

Before, there was the Festival of Chinese Cinema of Montreal (Assistant Director), the magazine Screen Machine (Editor-in-Chief) and the Fantasia Festival (Director of Programming, Asia).  There was also a book and two documentaries on Hong Kong cinema. 
Now, there is production (La Belle Bête, Ascension), and seeing where things go from there.
Since 2004, the Festival du nouveau cinema has been a new playing field, an open space in which I program with the eye of an audience member, ever seeking what is different, less authorized and all the while very pertinent.  I don’t like the obvious.  I like things that need to be sought-out, and even better, that conceal themselves.  I often dislike the widely-loved.  I also love that which we are unable to like.  The crazier we are, the more we laugh, isn’t that what they say?
So during the Festival, we come out in droves…as a way of showing to the “others” what cinema really is today.

A Breton in the land of Quebec, but of course.  An engineer in the land of cinema, why not?  After arriving to Montreal in 1994 as an engineer in aeronautics, I started to write for 24 Images in 1995, for ICI in 1998… and then for the Festival du nouveau cinema in 1999.  And such is my calling: a film critic with an eye onto the world, a smuggler of gazes, passionate about rising to the call of seeing and hearing in new ways, beholding the whisper as outcry...
Riding the same momentum, I transitioned into programming in 2000, and editorship of 24 Images in 2005, not in order to play judge but to defend—inch by inch, work by work—a certain kind of off-the-beaten-path cinema, that which is championed by the Festival du nouveau cinema, and more specifically, that which is embodied by short films, the laboratories of free form and ideas.

I, Madeleine Molyneaux, FNC's U.S. Programmer, first made the media gossip columns at the hardened age of 2 1/2; my mother, a rabid cineaste boasted to a local newspaper that I had shocked the family by my droll recitation of impending World Wars, stopping at number 23, a dirty habit picked up by an addiction to newscasters on the "idiot box". (I practically slept on top of our black and white T.V set; I attribute it to osmosis...or mind control). My fate was sealed: a steady diet of at least 4 films a week, the more subtitled the better, nothing off limits. Punk rock was next.
Programming for FNC is perhaps not such a long voyage from my late-night radio days in Berlin, exposing listeners to a steady stream of interplanetary sonic life, carefully selected to provoke and excite.
My work as an FNC programmer, curator, weekend dee-jay and creative producer for visual artists and visionary auteurs, including David Jacobson (Down in the Valley, Dahmer) and Kevin Jerome Everson ("According To", FNC 2007, Whitney Biennial 2008) keeps me away from the idiot box most of the time. Shameless endorsement: Montreal is my most favorite city, followed by New Orleans and New York where I unevenly divide her time. If the election doesn't gobama, I just may be marrying a Canadian. Or blowing up a television or two.

I love…I love sharing with others those things that fill me with wonder.  I love choosing films with my alley gang.  I love to paint with my little neighbors, Marie and Jeanne.  I love making photo-stories with my niece Camille, and I love my pooch Merlin.
During vacation, so as to not spend the entire summer with adults, I organized a film camp for young people between the ages of 8 and 14.  We made a movie, what a thrill!
During the year, I go to school…I accompany kids with difficulties.
In the future, I’d like for there to be even more kids at the Festival so that they can discover a different kind of cinema! 
I’m a programmer for youth and I’m 29 ½ years old.

I look for films.
I run the thing. 35mm reels in a room, to feel and touch images.  I’ve caressed a good many films. 
I’ve thought about it.  The relationship between film and philosophy.  This was in university. 
I’ve bartered.  Films in exchange for books, trying to figure out how to make them electronic.  Another mutation.
I’ve produced.  A variable fiction on the Internet.  It’s fun to fit a story into a database.  
I’ve written.  Texts to share my impressions.  To the right and to the left, here or there.  
I explore.  In the Laboratory of the Festival.  The phantasmagoria of images and sounds.
And film?
I’m looking, still looking...

Child of the Cinémathèque québécoise, I felt the need early on to tend to cinema, to take as good care of it as it had so often taken care of me. 
In middle school, I firmly believed that I would find myself a Frenchman to marry, thinking he’d speak to me in the words of a Jules, a Pierrot, or even better, an Antoine, and all this, for the rest of my life.
Film brings out the romance in us, you know. 
Since then, I’ve changed my mind, I also like subtitles…
Programmer of special events at the Festival for a third year, I continue to be fascinated by all that cinema can create.  I love when people, like me, are drawn in with open eyes. 
Film can draw tears, you know.
Again this year, we will offer more than 20 free events, huge parties, mixers, workshops, master classes, all with the cooperation of our many friends and collaborators, Ninja Tune and their passionate grooves among them. 
What I love above all else is the pride I feel of being able to count you among us, and if you feel like dancing, know that I will find you company.