Every year, Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma hosts an array of Canadian film treasures and buzzy international pictures ahead of their wide releases. Sam Thompson reports back on some of the best efforts at FNC 2025.

Magellan  
Dir. Lav Diaz

The early portion of Filipino director Lav Diaz’s Magellan refuses us the face of its titular protagonist. Gael Garcia Bernal might be the first bona fide star in a Diaz film, but his Magellan is initially absent, turned away, or obscured—just another figure lost in the calculated chaos of colonial violence, a solitary weft in the finely-stitched tapestries of Diaz’s protracted wide shots. Magellan is the anti-biopic: Diaz hijacks biographical conventions—moments from the life of the sixteenth-century Portuguese colonialist—in order to re-centre the lifeworlds and collective power of Indigenous peoples, and place the colonial expedition within a complex historical unfolding.

Bernal’s perennial boyishness—a face that’s always asking for mother’s forgiveness—works to disabuse the audience of the comforting notion that the brutal colonization of Southeast Asia emanated solely from the cruelty of individuals, rather than logics of racism and extraction that persist the world over today. Magellan shows the power struggles in the imperial core that precipitate the misbegotten voyage, as well as the banal personal grievances with military pay and pensions that motivate the expedition. Magellan is violent and prideful but lacks the centripetal personality (and satirical excesses) of the eponymous Spanish officer in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), another anti-colonial masterpiece whose intricate tableaux vivants belie a generalized state of abject confusion. The film’s conceptual imagination continually transcends the limits of an individual, biopic-able life: at sea, Magellan’s paranoiac control connects imperial voyage with queer persecution and fantasies of heterosexual harmony. The ship’s ceaseless creaking becomes the haunted soundscape to heat stroke, hunger and organized sadism, as the narrative chugs inexorably to its final act of refusal and resistance.

Wrong Husband 
Dir. Zacharias Kunuck

Don’t be fooled by the wrestling, Dragon Ball Z-style battles between spirit guides, Rocky Balboa workout montage, or amphibian troll: Wrong Husband is a love story as crystalline as arctic snow. Inuk director Zacharias Kunuck’s ancient tale of unjust spousal separation might seem slight next to his previous features, but it boasts a wonderfully textured portrait of precolonial Inuit life, spectacular vistas, and some very funny moments. The star-crossed couple, Sapa and Kaujak, structure Kunuck’s narrative, but it’s the duets between Kaujack and other female characters—her sick, protective mother and a new friend, full of joy and giggles—that provide its warmth, emotional depth and moments of complexity and ambivalence. In contrast, Sapa and Kaujak’s commitment to each other and to the retrieval of their shared future is moving in its unwavering certainty. There is never any doubt that they will finish building their qammaq (Inuit dwelling), look up at the stars hand in hand, and fulfill the promise of love that was made to them—and by them—in childhood. No troll can stop them.

Montreal, My Beautiful 
Dir. Xiaodan He

What kind of monster could feel anything but goodwill towards Montreal, My Beautiful, Xiaodan He’s emotionally nuanced—and ultimately euphoric—reifungsroman centred on the queer love affair of Feng Xia, a first-generation Chinese immigrant who lives in Montreal with her Chinese husband and two children? Is any living, breathing, feeling creature immune to the charms of its star, Joan Chen? Chen’s performance is shot through with a brittle nervousness, but also intelligence and courage, cementing her place in the lesbian cinematic pantheon, following Alice Wu’s 2004 rom-com Saving Face. Feng runs a dépanneur with her husband, a trained engineer who’s humiliated by the cruel strictures and expectations imposed on migrants living in Canada. She is emboldened to act on a reanimated queer desire, long buried with a lost childhood love, via state-subsidized French classes, where she grows in confidence and befriends a young, gay Cuban man. Montréal, My Beautiful’s romance builds to an operatic crescendo, but it’s more often concerned with everyday intimacies: kissing in a chalet, volunteering to be someone’s “emergency contact,” forgiving quickly after an awkward sexual encounter, and visiting a crush at work, homemade lunch in hand.

Dead Lover 
Dir. Grace Glowicki

The best Frankenstein riff at FNC wasn’t Guillermo del Toro’s glossy Netflix production but Dead Lover, a wee Canadian oddity, directed by Grace Glowicki, who also stars as a nameless gravedigger. Glowicki’s cemeterian sounds like a pub landlord, moves like Gollum and is desperate for romance. There’s one major problem: she stinks (we weren’t blessed with the Stink-O-Vision experience, unlike Toronto). Along comes a putrid-positive, raffish dandy, played by Glowicki’s husband and co-writer Ben Petrie. It’s love at first sniff. The gravedigger promptly loses Petrie’s dandy to the seven seas, and then reanimates him through horticultural means (it’s as weird as it sounds). Men play women and vice versa; gender norms are stretched, skewered, and satirized; and the film’s emotional core remains the gravedigger’s eternal wanting, a desire for a fabled entanglement whose sheer force will overcome not only the olfactory sense but the terrible finitude of life that confronts her every day. Despite Dead Lover’s playfulness, this hopeful yearning is treated with an affecting sincerity. The form of Glowicki’s film has its own Frankenstein quality, as she stitches together diverse sensibilities—a woozy, nineteenth century gothic fatalism; a ludic, DIY commitment to taking the bit where it needs to go; and a visual style that alchemizes Guy Maddin-esque 1920s pastiche, a knowing feminist excess à la Anna Biller, and the strange minimalism of late Derek Jarman—to construct the most purely pleasurable film of the festival.

Resurrection
Dir. Bi Gan

Resurrection, Chinese director Bi Gan’s latest feature, will generate a lot of opinions. There will be podcast discussions and bloated opinion pieces; there will be “discourse.” In the context of shrinking access to independent Chinese film, some will be desperate to catch a glimpse of the “real” China via an “authentic” artistic voice. Others will seek confirmation of existing prejudices—and will likely be utterly confounded. I’m still struggling to make sense of the film’s gnomic narrative, which starts with an homage to early cinema, establishes a sci-fi premise involving the eradication of dreaming, and then progresses historically through a series of obliquely-connected vignettes, which bounce from Confucian meditations to magicians and gangsters to the monstrous sublime. 

One thing is clear: this is not a departure from Bi’s previous films, as some have claimed, but a deepening of his inquiry into the limits and possibilities of representation as such. Can a film disclose capital-H History? Or is it, in fact, incapable of showing a simple object faithfully? It’s heady stuff, but there’s a cynic in me that wonders whether Resurrection is exactly the kind of quasi-theoretical, death (and rebirth?) of cinema elegy that guarantees a sycophantic Cannes reception. There’s a true believer in me too, breathless from the film’s first frame, still swooning at the closing, virtuosic long take, and wondering whether Bi Gan is destined to become one of the greats.

Sam Thompson is getting on with his PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. You can follow him on Letterboxd: @adequatesam.