Incendies – remember that title! 2010 Canadian film written and directed by Denis Villeneuve, adapted from Wajdi Mouawad‘s play, Scorched, and this one definitely deserves our attention.
Just in case you’re wondering why – here’s the answer. The movie has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and that’s why guys from Sony Pictures Classics have just set an April 22 release for the film in New York and Los Angeles with expansion expected over the weeks following…
Here’s the Incendies synopsis:
“When the mother of twins Jeanne and Simon passes away, she leaves them a pair of envelopes – one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn’t know existed.
Jeanne immediately decides to go to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows next to nothing. Simon is unmoved by their mother’s posthumous mind games, but still decides to join his sister.
While piecing together the story, they discover a tragic fate as well as the courage of an exceptional woman.”
Director Villeneuve is probably best known from Polytechnique premiered at the Cannes Film Festival May 2009 in Directors’ Fortnight Section out of competition.
The movie is described as true crime drama – shot in black and white, which depicts the Montreal Massacre of 1989, where a young man murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Polytechnique school.
It was the deadliest school shooting of the 20th century, and remains to this day the deadliest massacre in Canadian history.
But let’s get back to Incendies. The movie had its premiere on September 4, 2010 at Telluride Film Festival and, at the same month movie premiered at Toronto International Film Festival.
This January Incendies got a lot of attention at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The movie, which stars Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette among others, will compete against Mexico’s Biutiful, Dogtooth from Greece, Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (Denmark) and Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la Loi/Outside the Law (Algeria) for the Best Foreign Language Oscar on February 27, 2011.
Good luck, Incendies!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RcEQ-NOqSc&feature[/youtube]
Incendies Trailer
Another great year for foreign films. I think my favorite this year is Biutiful. Last year I loved the South Africa film, White Wedding. It is a shame it didn’t make it to the nominee list; it was a hilarious road-trip film. Have you all seen it yet? It was just recently released on DVD.