Festival du Nouveau Cinéma puts the spotlight on Concordia's Fine Arts students

Works of art and performances from all departments of Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts could be appreciated at l’Agora Hydro-Québec, the headquarters of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) last night, on Thursday, October 17. This was the first collaboration between the FNC and Concordia University and the result was a colorful one-night event open to the public.

Called Spotlight on Concordia Fine Arts, students Max Holzberg (Film Studies) and Siam Obregón (Film Production) were the event's head coordinators and part of the curatorial team. They had been asked by the FNC last Summer to organize it because of their previous experience as co-directors of the Concordia Film Festival. In addition to Obregón and Holzberg, the showcase was put together by four other student curators from the Faculty of Fine Arts: Anna Toneguzzi, Chloë Lalonda, Elizaveta Isakov and Tyra Maria Trono. A full list of the participating artists can be found on the Spotlight's event page.  

'We thought Concordia was a good place to start'

Zoé Protat, the FNC’s programming director, says she wants the Concordia showcase to start a tradition in the festival. They want to feature works from different fine arts faculties of Montreal universities through free one-night events every year.

“We thought Concordia was a good place to start. It has a very active arts community, and many filmmakers that present their work at the festival are from Concordia,” she says.

One of the student curators, Chloë Lalonde, says she is very happy with the event and was delighted to have been able to select works from each of the Faculty's nine departments. And like most of the FNC’s programming this year, many of the featured artworks were politically engaged.

“We also really put the forward the same main themes as the FNC this year: feminism, gastronomy, and the environment,” she says.

'Concordia students are collaborating more with the festival'

The night opened with the film Quand la nuit tombera, by film student Alexandre Lechasseur. The performance Vertige by dance student Eva Myers followed. The last performance of the evening was How to Be Seen, or the Act of Looking at Looking, by Zoé Fauvel. The audience also danced to the music of Midnight Sun, a Concordia music duo, who claim to “blend jazz and electronic, traditional Chinese and Arabic sounds, and Western Pop.”

In total, the event blended performance art, dance, painting, fibers, photography, film, and multi-media and design installations.

Max Holzberg says Concordia students are collaborating more with the festival every year. Kayla Fragman, who won best film at the 2019 the Concordia Film Festival, had her film Ilha Da Rainha shown at the 2019 edition of the FNC's Rencontres pancanadiennes du cinema étudiant.