|
Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra’s masterwork, is a lyrical film, full of acute observation, charm and macabre humour set in Quebec in the 1940s when the general store was the cross-roads of village life in Quebec. The action takes place on Christmas Eve when for a few hours the villagers could forget their poverty and converge on the store for gossip and revelry. In the midst of it all was Uncle Antoine with his ribald humour whetted by occasional recourse to the gin bottle, and always somewhere in the background, his nephew, Jacques, taking it all in. But for Jacques this night was to bring sudden initiation into the harsh and tragic realities of life. Mon Oncle Antoine is about Quebec and about the ebb and flow of hope and despair that might be in anyone’s memory. It is a film to be remembered for the insight it gives into the past of one Quebec community and for the vibrant way it brings it to life.
Mon Oncle Antoine is one of the few Quebec films to have reached a wide theatrical audience in English Canada, it was seen by one of the largest audiences ever for a Canadian film when it was first shown on television, and critics across Canada, in polls commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival in 1984 and 1993, voted Mon Oncle Antoine as the "greatest Canadian film of all time"
Credits:
Director: Claude Jutra
Producer: Mark Beaudet
Production Company: National Film Board
Length: 110 minutes
Production year: 1971
First Telecast: December 5, 1965
Program Genre: Fiction Feature Film
Writer: Clement Perron
Photography: Michel Brault
Editing: Claude Jutra, Claire Boyer
Music: Jean Cousineau
Sound: Claude Hazanavicius, Jacques Jarry
Cast: Lynne Champagne, Jean Duceppe, Jacques Gagon
Claude Jutra, Helene Loiselle, Benoit Marcoux,
Monique Mercure, Rene Salvatore Catta,
Olivette Thibault, Lionel Villeneuve
Awards:
1971 Canadian Film Award for feature film, and twenty other national and international awards.
Holdings:
The National Film Board of Canada holds the 35mm colour negative and both 16mm and 35mm elements. In 1995 a new colour corrected answer print was produced by Gudrun Klawe, under the supervision of Michel Brault, and new printing materials were then manufactured from the print. The original sound mix elements were re-mixed in Dolby Stereo by Jean-Pierre Joutel (the original sound mixer) just before he retired from the NFB.
| 
