Montreal World Film Festival president Serge Losique and director-general Danièle Cauchard are pleased to announce that a posthumous tribute will be paid to Alain Resnais at this year’s Festival to mark his extraordinary career. Actor and personal friend of Resnais, Hippolyte Girardot, will attend the film’s showing to accept the Festival’s award in Resnais’ honour.
One of the giants of French cinema, Resnais began his career in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. A contemporary of the French New Wave but not fully a member, his interests were broader, extending to politics and an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. In recent years this led to imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein and Jean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular songs.
“Alain Resnais was and will always be a great ambassador of the French cinema. His work marked many generations and we are greatly honoured to be able to pay him this tribute,” declared Serge Losique.
The Resnais tribute will be held on the Festival’s closing night, September 1, with the North American premiere of his final film, Aimer, boire et chanter (Life of Riley). Turning for the third time to the theatrical comedies of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn -- after Smoking/No Smoking (1993) and Coeurs (2006), Life of Riley was produced by Jean-Louis Livi, scripted by Laurent Herbiet, and stars Sabine Azéma, Hippolyte Girardot, Caroline Silhol, Michel Vuillermoz, Sandrine Kiberlain, André Dussolier and Alba Gaia Bellugi.
Hippolyte Girardot, will be present to represent the film and accept the tribute in Resnais’ name. A veteran of nearly 70 films, Girardot previously worked with Resnais on You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, released in 2012.
The 38th Montreal World Film Festival will run August 21 to September 1, 2014.