In its inaugural year, Montreal Critics’ Week has already made a name for itself by focusing on thoughtful curation and extensive discussions with filmmakers. Co-founded by film critic and programmer Mathieu Li-Goyette alongside collaborator Ariel Esteban Cahier, the festival showcases a diverse selection of titles without imposing competitive or thematic constraints. By creating a communal viewing experience—often featuring triple bills and long-form panels—Montreal Critics Week aims to spotlight lesser-seen cinema, nurture emerging voices, and foster rigorous debates about film and its cultural impact.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your program, your role in your organization?
Mathieu Li-Goyette (MLG): Yes. So my name is Mathieu Li-Goyette. I’ve been a film critic now for eighteen years. I’m also a film programmer. I’ve curated numerous retrospectives at the Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal. Also in other festivals, I was a guest programmer at the Berlin Critics Week in 2018. And it’s basically where I encountered this formula of having double bills and triple bills and then panels of discussion and debates after the screenings. It had a very big influence on me.
Then after that, I came back to Berlin every year to attend the festival, but also to attend the critic’s week. And then finally last year, me and a very good friend of mine, Ariel Esteban Cahier, who was for more than ten years a programmer at the Fantasia Film Festival, we arrived at the point where my colleague, Ariel, lost his job at Fantasia. And we’ve been wanting to build a project together—a festival project—for a couple of years now. And then when that happened, we saw a good alignment to do something.
So we decided to create this Montreal Critics’ Week, which is very inspired by the Berlin Critics’ Week. We managed to get enough support, but mainly, we used the savings of our film magazine, Panorama Cinema, to build this first edition. Then we got the support of the Montreal Council for the Arts, and a couple of other sponsors and partners, like MUBI, came in and we managed to do the first edition.
(UM): How is the selection process in your festival? How do you pick up the movies? Is it through open submission? How do you get to know?
(MLG): For the first edition, we didn’t have open submissions. We wanted to do some scouting and find our own identity also. We were lucky because, as we’ve been in the cinema industry for a couple of years now, we’ve had good contacts and a good network to pull from—for example, people from the Berlin Critics Week, people who Ariel knew when he was working as a programmer at Fantasia. So throughout our contacts, and also other filmmakers that we’ve come to know throughout the years as film critics, we were finally able to have a list—a long list—of films for consideration.
Then, we assembled a programming committee composed of film critics, in partnership with the AQCC, which is the Association Québécoise des critiques de cinéma, the Quebec Film Critics Association. Through that association, we got two who were not in our team—Justine Smith, who writes for Cult Montreal, Little White Lies, and Rogerebert.com, and Mélopée B. Montminy, who wrote for another Quebec magazine called 24 images. The others were people from our magazine like Olivier Thibodeau from Panorama Cinema. It’s the five of us who saw the film and had discussions about them.
Our festival doesn’t have any sections. So basically, our entire team needs to agree on a film for us to program it. Also, what added a layer of complexity is that, obviously, most of the time when you program a festival, you program the films that you love. We do program films that we love, of course, but after that, we have to find some agency between the films—like, to be able to make triple bills or double bills through a thematic programming. So we really needed to find films that fit together, and also find films for which we could invite the filmmakers and have them in our discussion. It needed to be a good fit, you know?
Because I guess that one thing that is particular with our festival is that we do not sell tickets for individual films. We sell tickets for programs. So these are triple bills, most of the time—three films (shorts, mid-length, feature films, fiction, documentary, experimental). So it’s like three hours of screening. And then after, we do a sixty-minutes discussion. So, like, it begins at 7 PM and ends almost around midnight.
(UM): And how many films in total have you selected?
(MLG): We had 15 features and then four shorts, if I remember correctly.
(UM): And, most of them were Montreal premieres? How was that?
(MLG): We had a couple of world premieres, which we were really happy about—especially for the first edition, that some filmmakers were confident in giving us their world premiere. Lots of international premieres also, North American premieres, and Canadian premieres. I wouldn’t say that we’re that much into the premiere race thou, also because we’re non-competitive – and we want to remain like that. But at the same time, I guess it’s telling because the main motivation that we had to start this festival is that throughout the last years covering other festivals in other places in the world as film critics, we saw so many great films that never came to Montreal.
And in that, we are really lucky because in Montreal, we have lots of different film festivals that have different specializations. And, of course, those festivals cannot show everything—we really understand that. At the same time, I’d say we have this kind of problem: we don’t have a lot of art house cinema, so we don’t have a lot of local distributors. And then in return, I think that a lot of festivals locally put the pressure on themselves to be a “festival of festivals” and take in the big films that had prizes elsewhere—Cannes, Locarno, Berlin. So it leaves very little space for small films and new voices, new filmmakers. Again, it’s nothing against these other bigger festivals in Montreal, but we really felt there was a need—or at least a space—to create something different and more focused.
Because I think that what we want to create with our Montreal Critics’ Week is a space of concentration. You are always in the same theatre, a bit always with the same people. The filmmakers go on the panel, but they’re also coming back throughout the week. And on the panels, we have other people as well—moderated by film critics, but also featuring people from other walks of life. Like, we had novelists, professors, philosophers, I mean, writers of any kind, musicians, cartoonists—people who are not necessarily in the movie industry but that we think can add something interesting to the discussion. By having this concept, we really wanted to create a space that cared for the film and managed to put the filmmakers in the spotlight for a long time.
On our poster you see the filmmakers’ names on it. They really are the stars of the show. And one of the feedbacks we received from this first edition—from sometimes first-time filmmakers or people who are really at the beginning of their career—is how it never happens, basically, to have sixty minutes in front of an audience when you are at the start of your career. I mean, to learn to speak in front of an audience, to talk about your work, to interact with other artists—it’s not a given. Some people are very good at it. Others need practice. It’s normal, I think, but it’s hard to get experience on that front, also because most of the time, some filmmakers have lots and lots of exposure compared to others, so this gap is widening. I’d say that implicitly, it’s also one of the goals of our festival.
(UM): And considering the fact that it was the first edition, how was the reception, in terms of ticket sales or attendance?
(MLG): It went beyond our expectations. We had a 98% occupancy rate. It was sold out every day—completely sold out. I mean, there’s not a seat left in the house. Because, of course, as in any festival, you have some no-shows, some people are just not coming, but every day we had rush lines, and every day the theater was completely full. Except for one screening, I basically didn’t get the chance to sit at my own festival.
(UM): And what did you use for advertising even though it was the first time? Is it networking?
(MLG): We printed flyers, printed these programs that we distributed around town. We have a partnership that I’m very proud of with a local college, Maisonneuve College. They helped us to get some volunteers. And then the volunteers from the college helped us to get the word around and distribute the flyers and catalogs.
In exchange for that, in April, in a bit more than a month, we’ll do a redux version of the festival at the college with one night of our programming for the students. And we will do a panel of discussion after the screening, but this time the guests will be the students, and I will be the moderator. That’s something we really want to push forward for next year because I think it’s really important to build the next generation of audience and cinephile and to be assured they are not only influenced by Netflix and streaming platforms and the big hype stuff. And I think it’s something that needs to be passed on. When I say college, it’s Cégep in Quebec—it’s the first place where you can go into a cinema program. We want to start at that base, not wait for graduate students at the university. That more pedagogical way of catering to the public is very important for us.
(UM): And in terms of what you offer to filmmakers apart from inviting them to come and participate in the event, did you offer any kind of monetary awards?
(MLG): We don’t offer any prize. It’s noncompetitive. But obviously, we are trying to find the monetary means to make it possible for them to come to Montreal. And we were really happy because, in the first year, we had twelve filmmakers in attendance. So obviously, one of our next goals will be to have all the filmmakers here with us because it’s really based on discussion.
(UM): And in terms of selection, do you have a kind of quota in mind, or is it just mostly based on artistic merit?
(MLG): What do you mean by a quota?
(UM): Race quota, gender quota, nation quota.
(MLG): No. We don’t have a quota. We have goals. We want to be inclusive, of course. I mean, it’s a very natural domino effect, you know, because what’s important for us is to have good programs. And for us to have good programs, of course, we need good films. We also need interesting filmmakers, and through that also the need to have interesting discussions. So what is an interesting discussion in 2025 or 2026?
For us, it’s to have discussions on cinema and politics, on decolonization, on how you film poverty, how you address it, how you tell stories of migrations—contemporary subjects. So, of course, if we want to talk about these subjects, very naturally, we will have films that are both signed by men and women and by filmmakers from Asia or Europe or Latin America. We’ll have stories about Indigenous people, of course, because we’re in Canada. These subjects unfold themselves very naturally, because we want to speak about them. But we are not working from the get-go on a quota basis.
(UM): As a Canadian, I know one of the issues is that Canadian filmmakers do not have enough space to represent their works. Montreal’s situation is different compared to the rest of Canada, but I’m just curious if you have any special spotlight section of Canadian movies.
(MLG): We don’t have any kind of section, as we don’t want the festival to be competitive. We don’t want to compartmentalize the films. For example, we had two Palestinian movies in our lineup. And, of course, we discussed within our team: do we put them together and have a program on this, or do we separate them and make sure that the discussion on this— I mean, the occupation and genocide that is going on— we cannot dodge it. We need to address it. We don’t want to stick them together and do a thematic programming that would really corner the attention to one place or the other. That approach applies across our program. The same goes for Canadian filmmakers. They are spread across the program, and we don’t really make any distinctions. For us, it’s cinema, and it’s about artists that have something to say.
(UM): And in terms of the timing for the event, I see that it’s happening in January. Why did you pick this moment? Because I know it’s a very winter time, so I’m just curious.
(MLG): Thank you for that question. There’s a couple of arguments. The first is that, as we work in a sort of counter-programming stance toward the other big festivals in town, it’s easier for us to wait for their programming to be done, and then we can fill in the cracks. Because at the end of the day, we are not that much into a race of getting a premiere before the other big festivals in town. Our priority is for these films to be seen. So if a bigger festival shows it, we’re happy with that. It’s okay.
There’s that. Also, we love the idea of having this kind of “bookending” of the year. Adding the festival at the beginning of January, it’s easier for us to have a good view of what happened in the year before—what cinema was like the year before. So we like to think about it as a kind of portrait of the very important or very singular themes for us that went on through the films last year.
It’s also why, from one edition to the next, we never work with preconceived themes. We really wait to listen to the films. And while watching the films, some themes emerge. But I don’t know what will be the themes for the second edition; I don’t want to know in advance. I want to discover them. Also, we don’t really have any film festivals in Montreal during winter. I find it nice because Montreal and Quebec—it’s a winter country, and it’s nice to have films from abroad in winter. It’s a change of pace.
It’s easier also because the festival is so demanding on the public—the screenings are long, the discussions are long. There’s something cozy about having them in January. You’re kind of tucked in together in a theater in Downtown Montreal. It was a very beautiful first edition for us. People were hanging together throughout a winter storm, and it’s minus 25 outside, and you find a refuge in the cinema. I like that idea a lot.
(UM): And in terms of venue, because securing venues is not always easy for festivals, I’m just curious how the situation is in your festival.
(MLG): In fact, it was a bit hard to find our venues. As I said, we have lots of film festivals in town, so the venues are very in demand. And most venues, of course, have their own programming. So we were able to secure two theaters for that first edition: the Cinémathèque Québécoise and the Cinéma Moderne. It was only one venue at a time, and eventually, during the week, we switched to the Moderne, and then for the closing night, we switched back to the Cinémathèque.
It went very well. Of course, the vibes are different because they’re different venues—one is more institutional, the other is more of a micro cinema with a bar and stuff, so it’s different. We like them both. Obviously, in a perfect world, the festival would be in the same spot. But we are hopeful to find one for the second edition. We have some venues in mind, and we’re already working on that.
(UM): And my last question, what will be your goal for the second edition? Do you have any specific goals for the second edition or your ideal?
(MLG): I’d say to get more funding, of course. It’s always hard to start a festival. We were lucky because we have the magazine backing it up, but of course, the magazine took a toll because of that. We don’t want the festival to hurt the magazine, and we want to keep the magazine alive. So it’s kind of a balancing act. I guess that throughout the next year and the upcoming years, the more financing we can find just for the festival, the better it will be for keeping the magazine’s funds intact.
We’d also like to have even more filmmakers. We might have a bit fewer feature films and a bit more shorts or mid-length films, just because our evenings were very long. I think it was very interesting, and as I said, it was basically sold out every evening, and people kept coming back. What we saw was that people were really not accustomed to that kind of formula, at least in Montreal. So our first two days were sold out pretty quickly, and then after people saw the formula, they booked tickets for the rest of the week while the week was going on. It worked in that way. But at the same time, I’d say because the program was so long, we missed some time for discussion. I would love the discussions to be longer because they’re so interesting, and people are staying, and filmmakers are loving it.
So, yeah, I think we stretched it a bit for the first edition—maybe just to show that we could do it. But we’ll adjust and fine-tune some things. Even when I say that, it’s nothing drastic. We’re really happy and proud of what we did, especially with the kind of resources that we have.
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