Greetings Oscar aficionados… this past week I saw Incendies by Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve which is nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Incendies is about a couple of Palestinian-Canadian twins who return to the Middle East following the death of their mother to unearth some family secrets. It’s a film about memory, multiculturalism, family, revenge and global conflict, set against a backdrop of twenty-first century Quebec and Lebanon. It’s a beautiful, tough-minded, lyrical film.
Villenueve’s previous effort, POLYTECHNIQUE, tackled the horrendous subject of the ‘Montreal massacre’ of female engineering students with both candour and subtlety. Incendies offers an even more unsparing and frank gaze at the human condition.
With Incendies, Villenueve joins Claude Jutra, Denys Arcand and other Quebec filmmakers at the highest level in a universal language of cinema.