High Five: Sophie Goyette

Sophie Goyette makes winning cinema that is beloved by prestigious festivals: At IFFR this year, her debut feature Mes nuits feront écho earned her the Impact Cinema Bright Future Award, and her short La Ronde, which is new to Fandor this week, racked up six awards after premiering at Locarno. Like her own increasingly impressive oeuvre, her picks (including one from her native Canada) are lyrical, sophisticated, and radiate authentic emotionality as they investigate essentially human questions. Here she is, in her own words, on her favorite Fandor films:

1. 1. Tabu (2012), dir. Miguel Gomes

      To anyone who ever lived a broken love filled with the most beautiful endless promises. For the poetry, the audacious narration, the importance of sound and silence in cinema, and the faith in the intelligence and sensibility of its audience: Mr. Gomes thank you.

      2. Le Quattro Volte (2010), dir. Michelangelo Frammartino
      I have never seen a film that was so close to life and its mystery at the same time. If you’re ready to ride high and far, nature will never look the same to you after this. Without music or dialogue, Frammartino will give you something rare: to relive a life four times.

      3. Diego Star (2013), dir. Frédérick Pelletier
      To discover Quebec winter at its best! And for the performance, larger than life, delivered by Isaka Sawadogo. Frédérick Pelletier offers a mature social-realist film about resistance on a human level. In these times when humanism is needed everywhere, this film is topical and more than welcome.

      4. Li’l Quinquin (2014), dir. Bruno Dumont
      This may be hard to believe,  but I have just discovered Bruno Dumont’s films in the past year. Yes, I know! I’ve started with his most humorous one: Li’l Quinquin, where you can still detect all his fabulous sensibility for framing, in the love he puts into in his choices for colors and frames — as painters do. Everything is so precise. Now discovering all of his works, his whole world is fascinating… and touching.

      5. Silent Light (2007), dir. Carlos Reygadas
      As a director, I like working with professional actors as well as non-professional, depending on the project. But on the non-professional level, what Reygadas was able to build as a film with the Mexican Mennonite community is mesmerizing, sensitive, and truthful. We sense at the same time the deep fascination and respect of the filmmaker towards that world, a combination that is so rarely depicted on film. The first and last shots of Silent Light are not to be seen, or to be heard, but to be lived.