Appointed director general of the Quebec City Film Festival, filmmaker Hugo Latulippe thinks big

MISE À DAY

Reroll the red carpet, filmmaker Hugo Latulippe takes the helm of the Quebec City Film Festival with the goal of making it a “national event within five years”.

“I want big Quebec films and I want filmmakers to want to be there because Quebec is party time. We're going to behave like a big city. We will not leave this advantage to Montreal, I guarantee it,” says the new general manager of the FCVQ.

In office since Wednesday morning to replace Martin Genois, who left his post last January, Hugo Latulippe arrives at the helm of a festival that has been hit hard by the pandemic.

The FCVQ was on a roll when it was forced to retreat into a hybrid format, like several other events cultural, in 2020.

The organizers then decided to cancel the festival in 2021, before relaunching it in a more modest format over four days and without competition in the fall of 2022.

Big ambitions

Hugo Latulippe, who has attended just about every major festival on the planet since the beginning of his career as a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and producer (he presented Ce qu'il reste de nous in Cannes, in 2004), intends to give back its letters of nobility to the FCVQ.

Under his leadership, from 2023, the popular open-air cinema will relocate to Place D'Youville and he is considering bringing back the competitive component. Foreign films will also be back, after a break in 2022.

“Quebec deserves a major film festival, a national festival. You just have to find its niche in the large festival market. The challenge is to make it a popular event that the people of Quebec want to attend, while giving it an artistic signature that sets it apart from other festivals,” says Mr. Latulippe, who wants to land big names in seventh art from here and elsewhere in Quebec.

“One only has to think of Quebec filmmakers who are making a career abroad. It's an interesting vein.”

A good time to get on board

The idea of ​​directing a festival like the one in Quebec City had been tossed about for a few years in the head of the filmmaker, who is precisely from the capital.

When the position became available at the beginning of the year, he was preparing to finish a TV series at TV5. The fruit was therefore ripe for the man who will divide his time between Quebec and Cacouna, in Bas-Saint-Laurent, where he acquired the local presbytery with his wife in 2017.

“Friends on the board of directors gave me a sign. I made a few calls to measure my support and I realized that I could do something for this organization.”

• The Quebec City Film Festival will be presented from 13 to September 17, 2023.