Nathanaël was invited this summer to film bands at the FME festival in northern Quebec. He returned with films of Thus:Owls, Clues, Mother Mother, Malajube, and a nice selection of other groups. He wrote and proposed his story to us; here it is.
My trip to FME was due to a simple but happy coincidence. While filming the Take Away Show of the Québécois group Karkwa, their manager Sandy told me about a festival he was organizing. He mentioned this place, lost in the wilds of northern Quebec; the city where he had grown up in the region of Abitibi, called Rouyn-Noranda, which transforms itself to become a musical centre for a week at the beginning of September.
It was without much hesitation that Antoine and I found ourselves there a few months later. And if we had hesitated, we certainly would have missed out – the festival has since been named best Canadian festival of the past year. We wanted to take advantage of the natural environment, incredible on its own, and of this unusual city, with its enormous factory right in the center. We quickly realised that no area would be off limits to us.
We found ourselves with access to everything that, as Parisians, we had never seen – the arena, the fire hall, and other usually inaccessible locations were completely open to us. This lent itself to an overwhelming desire to make a different kind of concert film, far from the average music festival recording of a tipsy musician around a campfire. We wanted to debunk the musical myth, taking a strong narrative angle that could be shocking or grating, a construct occasionally touched upon in other Take Away Shows – turning the film and its maker into the heroes of the story.
A young Parisian director named Quentin Lemoine, a pretty pretentious guy and a bit of an ass with holier-than-thou preconceptions, would confront playful musicians hidden all over the city and in the wilds beyond. A giant game of hide-and-seek in four episodes, where his typically French egocentric character would make sparks fly. All in the name of a film that should be watched tongue-in-cheek and as they would say over there, in their distinct French, “pour prendre bien du fun” (“just for kicks”).
DAY 1
Avec Mother Mother, Alfa Rococo, Camaromance et Random Recipe.
DAY 2
Avec Montgomery, Clues, Ariane Moffatt et Lake of Stew.
DAY 3
Avec Thus Owls, Mother Mother, le Roi Poisson, Clues, Brad Barr et Malajube.
DAY 4
Avec Thus Owls, Marie Pierre Arthur, Malajube et Ariane Moffatt.
Translation by Tara Dominguez
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