Interview: Montreal Critics' Week Programmers Discuss Their Inaugural Edition
Montreal Critics' Week programmers Mathieu Li-Goyette and Ariel Esteban Cayer discuss the goals and challenges of launching their new festival
In June 2024, the Montreal-based online film journal Panorama-cinéma announced it would launch the Montreal Critics’ Week in January 2025. At the time, the news was simply that: an announcement of the festival, with editor-in-chief Mathieu Li-Goyette saying the Critics’ Week would “encourage discourse around cinema in an inclusive manner and across various audiences and cinephilias, well beyond the usual Q&A session.”
Today, the Montreal Critics’ Week kicks off its first edition with a lineup that lives up to Li-Goyette’s description. It’s worth visiting the Montreal Critics’ Week website, which puts the festival’s distinctive structure front and centre. Rather than take the model of most film festivals of assembling new titles around fixed programming strands or competitive sections, this Critics’ Week curates nightly programs of films around a defined theme, followed by panel discussions with filmmakers, critics, writers, artists, and other guests.
The format takes inspiration from Berlin’s Critics’ Week, which curates film pairings with discussions after each screening. For the team assembling the Montreal Critics’ Week, the programming is creative and specific out of necessity, as it doesn’t associate itself with a larger festival occurring at the same time. Take the opening night program, which the festival describes as “dedicated to the art of reframing marginality.” After Park Sye-young’s enigmatic short Twilight, Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy’s documentary A Man Imagined screens, which follows a 67-year-old schizophrenic homeless man in Montreal as he survives the streets and the seasons in Montreal. Following that, Winston DeGiobbi’s fiction feature Two Cuckolds Go Swimming tells the story of an adult film star (Deragh Campbell) reuniting with her family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, only for the trip to go awry as wounds from the past re-emerge. The pairing of the two features, which handle similar subject matter through different forms and approaches, allows the post-screening discussion between the three filmmakers to open up beyond the circumstances of each film’s making.
Closing night features Universal Language by Matthew Rankin and A Shrine by Aboldreza Kahani both deal with Canadian and Iranian cultures and identities that also makes for a harmonious pairing (the double feature will be followed by a discussion between Kahani and Rankin). For many festivals, the idea of a communal experience they like to promote usually exists in the literal sense; a group of individuals come together in a room to watch the same film, with the chance of a brief Q&A afterwards. The Montreal Critics’ Week structure encourages engagement for guests and audiences beyond the familiar. It creates opportunities to generate ideas that come out of what’s shown on screen, rather than focus on immediate reactions that tend to dissipate after audiences leave the room and before their next screening begins.
Several days before the start of its inaugural edition, I spoke with Li-Goyette, who also acts as the festival’s General Manager, along with Director of Programming Ariel Esteban Cayer. Li-Goyette served on the selection committee for the Berlin Critics’ Week in the past, while Cayer has programmed for multiple festivals and is a co-founder of the home video label Kani Releasing. Our discussion covered several of the festival’s selections, the challenges of launching a new film festival, and where they found inspiration to achieve their vision.
The Montreal Critics’ Week takes place from January 10 to 17, 2025, in Montreal, Quebec. To find out more about the films playing, the guests attending, and to purchase tickets, you can visit their website at https://www.semainedelacritique.ca/en.
How are you both feeling going into the first edition of Montreal Critics’ Week?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: We're tired already. [Laughs] No, I think we're excited. I am curious to see how it goes. I don't think that what we're proposing is necessarily easy or commonplace, or like any other festival, and I don't mean that in a snooty way. I mean that we're trying to build something rather conceptual, rather experimental. That spills over into the programming, of course, but it also spills over into the sort of tension you need to give it, this idea of double bills, triple bills, talks that may go on long after the films. Hopefully there's a good cohesion between the audience and filmmakers that are present, and the critics. All of this is a big factor that we've never experienced, right? I’ve put on festivals, I have experience with bigger festivals, but ultimately they are bound by a more rigid formula. I think this is a different thing that we're trying to put together.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: It's a bit unorthodox as a formula. I'm really eager to see if the people will buy in, stay for the discussions, and be curious about how we assemble the different programs. Obviously, we want the public to ask themselves [questions] while they’re watching, to create links and bridges and thoughtful reflections. For us, this was a means to put at the forefront the curatorial gesture of programming, and to ask ourselves what it would look like if film critics were organizing a festival. It cannot be done in the same way that it is usually done. I'm curious to see what the feedback will be.
The Critics’ Week is commonly associated with Europe because the big three festivals [Berlin, Cannes, Venice] have them. It's not very common in North America. I'm only aware of Tribeca, which launched several years ago. What made you want to bring a Critics’ Week over here and introduce the first of its kind to Canada?
Mathieu Li-Goyette: I was a guest programmer at the Berlin Critics’ Week in 2018 and it's where I saw this formula for the first time. I was super charmed by it, the idea of having these programs and long talks. Parallel to that, I've been working as a film critic and editor-in-chief of Panorama-cinéma based in Montreal for the past 15 years, and I've seen the festival landscape evolve and change a lot during this time. There are more films from everywhere and less space to watch these films in good conditions and have good discussions after screenings. While working and observing the scene, eventually we told ourselves that we should try.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: I think we're doing it a bit atypically from the European formula, where usually the Critics’ Week is pinned to a festival and acting as a parallel section to it, or it’s a sort of reaction to that festival depending on the dynamic. In studying this model, we also realized how interesting the Berlin Critics’ Week is for being very radical with the double bills and debates. The Cannes Critics’ Week is different. It has a very different flavour that is more institutional, I would say. It caters to the Cannes type of prestige film in its own way, it's very theme driven and industry driven in a way that we didn't necessarily want to do. We looked at these different formulas and we were able to figure out that we can do it our own [way]. We can take the Berlin example but tailor it to our own context, which is the Canadian festival scene or more specifically the Montreal festival scene. We can try to create that space for other types of films that don't get to play as much in Montreal, or that we want to defend in this specific context.
I assume we all agree that the role of a critic today is very precarious. By its nature, an event like this puts the critic in a central and active role. How would you both describe the role of a critic today, and how do you want this Critics’ Week to play a part in or influence that?
Mathieu Li-Goyette: There are two sides to my answer. The first side is to think about what film critics can still bring to the ecosystem of films and to the industry in a larger sense. I think we've been put on the sidelines for almost 20 years because it became such a diverse ecosystem. Before there was only print and some magazines, and now there's Letterboxd. And with Letterboxd and stuff like it, it's kind of a cliche to say but everybody can be a film critic in some sense.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: Because no one's getting paid. [Laughs]
Mathieu Li-Goyette: So where is film criticism? What makes a writer a film critic? By structuring this festival like we did, as I said before we wanted to put that curatorial gesture at the forefront, and therefore put the critical mindset at the forefront.
The other side of my answer would be regarding how we can live as film critics in this industry. And as I say that, it's also important for us to build a festival where we can think about cinema, film critics, and film criticism. But it's not only a matter of thinking about aesthetics and formalism, styles and themes. Panorama-cinéma is 20 years old, and when it began it was built on volunteering from everybody. It took a lot of years and a lot of hard work to get some grants, be recognized seriously, and have some funds to get paid. Eventually it hit a ceiling, because there's so much money you can find in Canada to write about films. And I totally understand this reality, there's only so much. The idea of building a festival is also finding some other ways, as a magazine, as film critics, as an organization, to make a living out of it.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: For me, what Mathieu is saying, structurally that’s a practical answer. Unlike Mathieu, I'm a programmer by trade first and a hobbyist critic second. Something that always came up in our conversations, and this might be a bit snobbish but no disrespect to anybody, is that having programmed for so long with so many people, I think the best programmers also have a critical viewpoint on their work and the films themselves. This is what guides their choices, and beyond this matter of taste it's about how you position yourself with a film. How you position a film, what your choice means, what context, and so on.
And then there's a whole other type of programmer that is only catering to industrial requirements or needs, the stakeholders, the studios, and whatever else. At that point the act of programming itself might be a bit meaningless. It becomes a job. I've had these jobs, but I think I've always approached them without losing sight of this critical stance. For me, that was what drew me to the project. I changed nothing about my way of approaching programming, but it clicked in this way where this is a framework in which we can be as opinionated and precise as we want to be.
I wanted to ask something that I think is true of almost all festivals, which is maintaining a balance between adhering to the frameworks and expectations of film festivals while trying to establish your own identity. I think your festival’s structure is quite distinctive, especially within North America. At the same time, you have premiere titles, whether it’s World, North American, or otherwise. You also have Canadian titles in the program, and I'm assuming part of that is required to get government support. Can you discuss navigating these spaces while putting this event together?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: I'm proud to say we did nothing through obligation, although to cover the Canadian component, it was important for us from the start. Not because of grants, but because of positioning ourselves to have a strong Canadian component to the program and to seek these underrepresented or under-programmed films that we may want to defend. It wasn't really trying to tick a box. It was more trying to see how we could be useful matching our means to the project. Then the layer on top was scouring different lineups of different festivals and trying to see what had yet to play in Montreal, what we thought was interesting and hadn't been picked up, again where we could be useful. I guess it was through a mix of these two approaches that we ended up with the program that we have. At no moment did we feel constrained or have to fit a certain category, except maybe trying to make everything work budget wise. Of course that ends up informing the choices, but we also let that guide the selection.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: It's like we built the airplane and [we got to get it in the air]. In September, we had four different coexisting budget structures. We had Plan A, which was a full fledged week with filmmakers every evening. But we also had a Plan B, which was like the critics’ weekend. It was two days and only with local filmmakers. We joked to ourselves that, even if we get no money at all, we'll still do it just to see if people respond to it. It wasn't easy, but we were able to get to our Plan A and have the kind of dream edition that we wanted to do from the get go.
You're saying the compromises were more logistical or budgetary, and even if that ended up being a constraint, you would have found a way to achieve something artistically and conceptually within those constraints.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: Exactly. I think the constraint becomes a creative motor as well. That was fun to experiment with, just in terms of curation.
Did you consult with other Critics’ Week festivals while putting this together to get any insight from them?
Mathieu Li-Goyette: Yes and no. We had a nice meeting, like a Critics’ Week dinner in Berlin last year. It was the first time that all the Critics’ Week festivals were together in one room. There were people from Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, and we [were the new guys]. So it was kind of stressful because at that point it was like, “Now we need to make it happen.” We had zero resources at that point, too. It really was a case of fake it until you make it, but it finally worked.
I've been friends with Dennis Vetter of the Berlin Critics’ Week for a couple of years now. He's coming to Montreal to support us for this first edition, and he'll be moderating one of the talks, but we didn't share any kind of programming. What we shared was more like some experience about how to organize these things, and a matter of balancing between the films and the parameters. This is a bit unorthodox too, because we have 26 panelists for seven discussions. It's a lot of people, and I think it’s harder to moderate than a traditional Q&A. At the same time, it's more stimulating. And I think that the ceiling of these conversations can be higher and more singular than a 20 minute Q&A after a film.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: And, pragmatically speaking, it was a way for us to form our first edition. We have Japanese films, and we have a Taiwanese film, but we couldn't afford to fly people from Asia, unfortunately. Things needed to happen organically, much more than they would at a bigger festival. And so it also became our way to build something out of it and put critics and writers at the forefront. I think we naturally ended up with an interesting mix. Some screenings have panels that are more traditional in structure, and some evenings will be purely conceptual. We have a cartoonist on a panel one night with two writers and a filmmaker. I hope this kind of mingling and different approach to thinking about cinema generates interesting conversations.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: In Berlin, they're happening in parallel to the Berlinale and the European Film Market, so there are lots of people in town to fill in their panels. We don't have that. On the other hand, Quebec has a rich magazine scene where there are lots of periodicals that are published. There are a lot of film critics, a lot of essayists, a lot of people who write on culture in general, and we wanted to tap into that ecosystem. These people are watching and thinking about films every day, so they should be invited on stage sometime.
I want to go back and talk about your festival’s structure. How did you end up deciding upon this structure?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: We took inspiration from the Berlin Critics’ Week with the double bills, and then it became a matter of finding the thematic or aesthetic pillars of the program. That happened gradually as we liked certain films or found certain films interesting. Then it became this sort of organizing principle where we had a number of films that we were going to program [followed by] what we can build around that. Because we thought of everything through a conceptual lens, it ended up creating a politically charged program.
For example, we open on a program of A Man Imagined and Two Cuckolds Go Swimming. One is a Montreal documentary. The other one is a fiction from Cape Breton. I think they both film poverty and Canadian austerity in very poetic and interesting ways that are also a mirror, I suppose, of our production system. One is a National Film Board production, very much in the old style of documentary filmmakers in Canada. The other is a more independent production with some government funding. It became a good occasion for us to maybe address that a little bit, and to hopefully talk about that with the filmmakers. So themes of poverty, and ecology as well, became a throughline of filmmakers interested in the natural world in very different ways.
On another night, we match a little sci-fi thriller that's barely an hour long with a more expansive documentary by Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré. By no means are they famous, but Pierre Creton's last film played at Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight and went on to do a lot of festivals. We're building it block by block and seeing how everything speaks to each other without limiting genres or approaches to try to make something quite interesting. It's an experiment. It remains to be seen if it works. Will the audience respond? Will it flow nicely? I hope so.
To build off of that, you're making a clear effort to reframe the way that we are viewing films, especially in the festival environment. How would you describe the process of deciding upon the themes that came to define each night?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: I think I tried to be sensitive to the ways that we were building this thing, which a lot of the time was under duress. [Laughs] If we're being honest to what you were saying earlier of the hardships of working in this field in Canada, whether you're a film programmer or film critic, it's not an easy path. I think that ended up informing a little bit of the worldview of the festival, which isn't one of prestige and red carpets. It is one where we try to be sensitive to, again, these political issues of austerity, poverty, ecological collapse, war, memory. These are all things that maybe rub the wrong way, or create tension. Which isn't to say that there aren't perfectly pleasant films in the program, either. We're screening Matthew Rankin's Universal Language, which is doing amazing. And it's a fairly well funded and produced, high-budget film as far as Canadian films go. But if you watch the film, it does speak to a specific kind of Canadian anxiety and alienation that I think, taking our positions as critics as the starting point, ended up informing the choices of the films that we wanted to defend.
Right after Matthew Rankin's film we're screening A Shrine by Abdolreza Kahani, who's been living in Montreal for a very short time. He's an expat from Iran, and he's producing and making films here independently and completely outside the system. It’s a one man show kind of production akin to what Hong Sang-soo is doing now, shooting films in 720p with a crew of three people. A Shrine was shot on a cell phone around Montreal in the winter, and yet it’s informed by real filmmaking skills. It was a great discovery for us. The film world premiered in Edinburgh, we watched it a bit apprehensive at first, but then we looked more into it. And this filmmaker had this career where he won at Karlovy Vary [in 2009], and then had to flee Iran, ended up in France, and is now in Canada. For us, it became something to latch on to. And this is also an uncanny mirror to Matthew's film. All that is to say this economy of means in terms of filmmaking, what a more fragile film or independent or low budget film might be, and then to complement that with other other flavours, let's say, ended up being a bit of the ethos of the festival.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: There was also a lot of thought put into the order of the films. What are we showing first? How do we manage a short film? Do we want to squeeze it in between two feature films or do we put it at the end, because we don't want people to forget the short after a three hour [screening]. I found that interesting to program and think about.
You’ve described this festival as radical, and I would like to know how that’s gone over from the industry side. What has it been like working with the filmmakers and rights holders as you’ve been putting this together? What has the response been from that side?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: Honestly, it's been a self-selecting process for the most part. I think people understood what we were trying to do.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: I think it went great. The response was really positive, especially on the filmmakers’ part. People seem really happy to be invited to this kind of event. For example, Carson Lund for Eephus. He's coming to Montreal to show his film in a 55 seat theatre.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: And in the middle of winter, just because he likes the idea [of the festival]. I think there was an immediate understanding, maybe because it's called a Critics’ Week, of what we're trying to do in terms of creating an intimate space for filmmakers and audiences. I think there has been a desire for that. Of course, getting into Cannes is amazing, or going to TIFF is amazing. But ultimately I think we did sense, especially from independent filmmakers [who make up] 99% of the program anyway, that they wanted to be there if they could. I think it went both ways. We gravitate towards people that would understand, and vice versa.
I only had time to watch the opening and closing selections, and you've already spoken about them. To frame this question a little differently, could you explain why you chose these particular films and themes to bookend the festival?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: I don't know that it was so clear cut at first, if we're being honest. I think there is something final about A Shrine in the way that it ends, and the beautiful statement in the credits.
It's like an apology, which is so strange.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: It felt really moving and apologetic, and it was [similar to what] we were trying to achieve ourselves. We felt very close to this film and this credit sequence in particular. I think it placed itself there naturally. It also gave us permission to bring Matthew [Rankin] back into the mix with Universal Language. At first, we were putting hard limits on not bringing films that were already screened in Montreal, to give ourselves a set of parameters. We ended up making an exception for Matthew's film, because on the one hand it is so extraordinary, but also because it was such a perfect thematic mirror [to A Shrine]. We really wanted to see what that conversation would look like between Abdolreza and Matthew.
And then the local feature [A Man Imagined] made perfect sense for the opening. For one, I think [Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky] are amazing documentary filmmakers, and they've been a staple of the documentary film festival scene in Montreal for many years. Something curious happened with this film which, despite it being an NFB production and having world premiered in Rotterdam, it somehow fell through the cracks. We monitored it all year, fully expecting not to be able to screen it. When it became apparent that we could, it was such a perfect statement of intention, both thematically and formally. It also opened up a lot of the aesthetics of the festival in the curation and also the printed materials. The poster is made from a location scout photo from Universal Language. In fact, all the graphics that we're using on social media are his location scouting photographs that we've manipulated in certain ways. There was this urban aesthetic that emerged, and also this beautiful juxtaposition with the natural world that Brian and Melanie direct in A Man Imagined that we latched onto, which naturally found its way in the rest of the program. We have a film later on, Fujiyama Cotton, that is set on a farm where they grow cotton and flowers. Somehow it all clicked. Of course, this is totally engineered by us, but it became an alignment of sensibilities and aesthetics that we had to tune in on.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: It also speaks to how we wanted to create a program made of a big stretch between different kinds of filmmaking and realities. When we program a double or triple bill we’re asking ourselves how much we can stretch this thing. How much can we stretch these discourses, and how much can we stretch what these films have to talk about between themselves? If you take the opening program with the Saturday program, for us it made a loop between A Man Imagined and Spiders Web. [There are] two kinds of Canadian poverty filmed in totally different ways, and it made sense for us to have all these filmmakers on the same panel on Saturday evening, to bring back Brian and Melanie to have a talk with [Ben Roberts & Oliver Roberts, directors of Spiders Web].
My final question is about something that has organically come up through our discussion, but I wanted to have a question addressing it head-on. Over the years, I've thought about festivals more so in terms of space rather than as a dumping ground to watch various films. I want to know how you would define the space that your festival is creating, and what you hope the people in that space will experience and ultimately take away from it.
Ariel Esteban Cayer: Physically speaking, we're occupying two spaces. One is the Cinémathèque québécoise on the opening, Tuesday, and closing night. And then there’s Cinéma Moderne, which is a neighbourhood cinema in the Mile End. It’s a 55 seater and adjacent to a bar, and very cozy as a result. Of course, both spaces will have different dynamics, but we do hope that people come together in those spaces and really mingle around the films. Creating this occasion to talk is really the key here. Even though you know a standard Q&A audience reaction, there's a protocol to it that has an illusion of proximity because you’re kind of rushed. We're hoping to break that a little bit. Will it work? I don't know, but [we want to] create a cozy, inviting, and intimate space for filmmakers and audiences. I think it will happen at Cinéma Moderne naturally because of the size of the space.
Mathieu Li-Goyette: And I'd say, maybe from a more theoretical point of view, it's also a matter of creating a focal space in the same way you'd say a safe space. A space where you create focalization, where we can try to share a gaze or an [understanding] of cinema. To build a spectatorship, a stance and discussion around these works. To build some concentration. You have these streaming platforms, and it's so easy to get lost and not be so attentive to what filmmakers have to say. So how can we create concentration?
Ariel Esteban Cayer: The idea was to create this structure in which the contents of the films emerge almost by force because we are forcing these thematic conversations to happen. I'm not saying that audiences are not doing this sort of thing internally when they leave the cinema, but there is this propensity to treat it as disposable. You consume the movie and you move on with your life. The focalization here hopefully creates that [space] for the audience, and maybe a different experience for filmmakers too. We'll see.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.