Mon Oncle Antoine

Is Claude Jutra’s extraordinary Mon Oncle Antoine the greatest Canadian film ever made? In 1984, 1993 and 2004 polls conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian critics, scholars, and film industry people were asked to name the ten best Canadian films of all time; Jutra’s movie topped the list each time. Set during the 1940s in a remote Quebec mining community, this evocative, warm-hearted, serio-comic work chronicles the coming-of-age of young Benoît (Jacques Gagnon), a 15-year-old orphan who loses his illusions and his innocence one Christmastime as he observes the adult world of hypocrisy, unhappiness, and incompetence. The narrative centres on a sleigh trip Benoît and his drunken undertaker uncle must take in the midst of a snow storm, to recover a neighbour's body. The film is rich in detail, incident and characterization, and features the beautiful wintry cinematography of celebrated cameraman Michel Brault. Jutra himself is part of the excellent ensemble cast; his disappearance and death in 1987 – by suicide, it transpired, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – deprived Quebec and Canadian cinema of one its greatest talents. “A wonderful, possibly a great film . . . Mon Oncle Antoine suggests the Satyajit Ray of the Apu trilogy” (Donald Chase, Film Comment). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 104 mins.

WARNING: nudity, coarse language