Alireza Keymanesh and Amir Pousti, Flatland (still), 2017.
The International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), which runs March 17 to 29 in Montreal and March 20 to 29 in Quebec City, has released the full lineup for its 38th edition.
The program includes more than 240 films, documentaries, interactive works, music videos and media works addressing various forms of art. This year the festival includes 47 world premieres and 52 Canadian premieres.
Leila Khalilzadeh, an Iranian director based in Montreal, is curating a special program of works by Iranian artists, and the online platform NOWNESS presents a program on Chinese artists.
Notably, in an era when many film festivals have been criticized for a lack of female directors, the official competition and selections for FIFA 2020 feature as many films directed by women as by men.
The opening night’s film is We Are Not Princesses (2018) by Bridgette Auger and Itab Azzam, a documentary that follows a group of Syrian women in a Beirut refugee camp as they mount a production of Sophocles’s Antigone.
Several artists are also directly involved in the festival. A special program curated by Rad Hourani will screen March 22, while a master class by Mark Lewis rolls out March 18.
In terms of topics around contemporary and modern art, there are documentaries and films about the work of Marina Abramović, Sigalit Landau, Shirin Neshat, Katharina Sieverding, Niki de Saint Phalle, Dora Maar, Pedro Lemebel, Mary Pratt, Crystal Pite, Robert Davidson, Elliott Erwitt and Marcel Duchamp, among others.
For viewers interested in historical art, FIFA also features L’Affaire Caravage (2019), about how the art market responded when a 400-year-old painting by Caravaggio emerged, as well as Léonard de Vinci: Le chef d’oeuvre redécouvert (2019), about the Louvre authenticating a work by da Vinci.
A special experimental program curated by Nicole Gingras also includes six North American premieres.
