In what could be an early frontrunner in the Oscar derby for
Best Foreign Language Film this year is French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux’s
beautiful love story, Félix and Meira.
Oscilloscope Laboratories announced this past week that Félix
and Meira will be available on DVD this coming Sept. 29.
With the byzantine rule of the Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts & Sciences one has to wonder if the film’s extensive festival release
activity in 2014 (with multiple wins, including the prestigious Toronto International
Film Festival) somehow disqualifies it for 2015 contention.
The film did open theatrically in mid-April
of this year, so that makes it a 2015 theatrical release … and it is in French
and Yiddish. Even if it is from our
neighbor to the north it sure looks like a foreign language film with a
theatrical release … sounds like a contender.
In any case, ticket sales have been exceptionally good at $435,628
and that mid-April rollout for Félix and Meira generates an ARR of
165 days.
Meira (played by Israeli actress Hadas Yaron — Fill
the Void) is a 20-something Hasidic Jew, married and living in
Montreal. Her life is bound by orthodox
rules that prevent her from doing little more than being a faithful wife to her
husband, Shulem (Luzer Twersky — Where Is Joel Baum?, Romeo
and Juliet in Yiddish) and a dutiful mother to their young daughter.
Félix is a French Canadian in his early 40s and he is having
something of a crisis in his life. His
father has recently passed and there was no closure.
He is without faith and she lives within doctrine of faith
that spells out everything form a to z … they are from completely opposite
worlds. They don’t even speak the same
language and have to use their limited English skills to bridge the gap between
French and Yiddish.
But a chance meeting brings these two opposites
together. It’s a slow process and
filmmaker Maxime Giroux (who co-wrote the script with Alexandre Laferrière)
does a marvelous job in getting the audience to feel for Félix and Meira; to root
for them. It is a love story that seems
so wrong, but somehow their growing affection for each other makes it feel so
very right.
Félix and Meira is
presented in French and Yiddish, with two separate subtitle options — one in
English, the other in French.
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