Outlook on FFDD23: Focus Québec by Matthew Rankin

This year, Focus Québec is being curated by the Canadian director Matthew Rankin. With his selection of personal favourite short films from Québec, the audiences will experience daring and radical depictions of Québec, and that with a lot of humour, atmosphere and formal innovations. The director, screenwriter and film editor, who was born in 1980 in Winnipeg, Canada, studied at the Department of History and Classical Studies in McGill University, Montreal, as well as at the Université Laval, Québec. After making numerous short films, which were also screened at Filmfest Dresden (including THE TESLA WORLD LIGHT in 2018), with The Twentieth Century, the director has now made his first feature-length film, which was already screened at the Berlinale, among others.

“My programme is made up of bold and radical depictions of Québec as both a natural and a constructed world. The filmmakers in this selection have great concern for humour, mood, formal innovation and for transmogrifying the system of codes and cues in which we typically identify Québec as a cinematic object. These are also, very simply, my favourite Québécois short films.”

Statement Matthew Rankin