Matthew Wolkow

Lucie, a PhD student without a work visa and plagued by insomnia, is trapped in a destructive affair with her thesis advisor while being pursued by a jealous ex. Seeking help from a reclusive shaman on the city’s edge, she meets Béatrice, a young woman as carefree as she is determined to help her.

At once simple, profound and light-hearted, Minutes is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.

Three groups of adolescent girl friends from Quebec are going through tough changes. The process of inventing their own bodies and identity are being recorded on the move by their smartphones and shared with their peers from other parts of the networked world. Due to their strong need of external confirmation, they alter their lives into a series of retouched pictures and videos. The film camera, however, captures their feelings of void, loneliness and deep inner insecurities that are not so attractive for Periscope, TikTok or Instagram. An intimate portrait of adolescence is made with full comprehension of experiencing and self-presentation in a generation growing up on the brink of the real and virtual worlds.

An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialog between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X of periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States, invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings of history, the power of nature and rebirth.

Animating is a long journey of solitide.

Much of Godin’s purple, declarative dialogue is delivered at a breakneck pace, as though these verbally nimble actors are running lines at auctioneer-speed while simultaneously playing their intentions to the hilt. The film is an exercise in radical compression, its velocity integral to its comic effects, though all the rapid-fire yakking and spastically edited reverse-shot sequences lead to a wordless denouement in which Mésuline searches her pockets for a cigarette in a shot that’s hardly protracted yet still takes up about one-fifth of this taut little film’s runtime. Her pleasure in finally lighting up is fairly adorable.

This short film tells the story of a meeting between two neighbours, in Ahuntsic and Villeray, around memories of Portugal; it is a story of two very different cities, Montreal and Lisbon; of an old man who has come to terms with death; of two strangers separated by an ocean but connected by the flight of a homing pigeon. Birds are the guides for this poetic meandering, exploring memories of the past and portents of the future. A dissonant score accompanies a split screen, completing the impression that we are confronted with a sensory puzzle, at once natural and urban, in which meditation takes its cues from fragments of reality. Matthew Wolkow’s film is a gentle ornithological, human and floral tale, suffused with both hope and the grim anxieties of our time. (Apolline Caron-Ottavi)

Exterior. Day. Montreal / On the outskirts of the metropolitan highway, there is a Mediterranean fig tree / Named Ficus carica, this tree is the work of a 60-year-old Montrealer of Argentine origin / The miracle of a backyard where three regions of the world meet / The story of an observation.