MONTREAL - Babek Aliassa has a few things going against him in Quebec.
First, he hasn?t lived here long enough to feel ?chez nous.? (Toronto was home from 1996 to 2010; before that it was Paris, and before that Iran, his birthplace. He now lives temporarily with his in-laws in Belarus.)
Second, ?de souche? Quebecers have trouble with his ?foreign? name. (He?s not alone: In the current Quebec election campaign, Saguenay mayor Jean Tremblay has complained ?we can?t even pronounce? PQ candidate Djemila Benhabib?s name.)
Third, Aliassa is a secular Muslim who has chosen to do his debut feature film ? a family drama called Boucherie Halal (Halal Butcher Shop) ? about Islamist extremism in Montreal. It?s a touchy subject in the Muslim community.
To top it off, his film?s $400,000 budget was funded in Toronto, not here. Quebec?s cultural funding agency, the SODEC, refused to give him a grant.
Despite all this, Boucherie Halal wound up in competition in the first-films category of the 36th annual Festival des films du monde, one of only two Quebec films competing at the fest.
And Aliassa is revelling in the moment, because it gives him a voice.
He strongly feels Quebec needs more filmmakers like him: willing to portray immigrants? lives, to hire immigrant actors, to throw light on new Quebecers the mainstream is aware of mostly through clich?s.
?Everyone knows that Quebec cinema operates in a bubble. (Producers, financiers, directors) are still not open to the real society that?s out there,? the 49-year-old filmmaker said Tuesday.
?One out of four people you run into in Montreal comes from somewhere else. Why shouldn?t filmmakers here reflect that in the movies they make??
Sure, he said, someone like Oscar-nominated director Denis Villeneuve can look to the Middle East for inspiration in Incendies, and An?is Barbeau-Lavalette can premiere her Palestinian drama, Inch?Allah, at next month?s Toronto International Film Festival.
But besides Philippe Falardeau?s Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar, about the lonely life of an Algerian immigrant teaching primary school in white bread francophone Montreal, it?s rare to see a Quebec feature film that focuses on the lives of immigrants.
Aliassa hopes to change that.
Shot in Lasalle and Verdun, Boucherie Halal centres on a young Muslim couple (played by National Theatre School graduates Mani Soleymanlou and Christine Khalifah) whose meat shop on a quiet suburban Montreal street is put under surveillance by police.
The cause is the husband?s father, an imam (Sa?d Benyoucef) who comes to town from abroad and opens a small mosque in the back of the shop, using it as a base to spout fundamentalist sermons to the faithful. When it turns out he might have a terrorist past, the axe falls.
As an inter-generational drama (the son is torn between obeying his father and pleasing his more liberation-minded wife), the movie is by no means perfect. At times it?s as pedestrian as a TV soap opera.
Aliassa knows its failures. If he could do it over, he?d change the opening scenes and get much more quickly to the couple?s central dilemma, which is that they?re trying to have a baby but she can?t conceive.
Chalk it up to the growing pains of a first feature. Besides a couple of documentaries, Aliassa only did a short film before this one: Le Faisan (The Pheasant), about a boy who reluctantly goes hunting with his dad; it was selected for the World Film Fest back in 2004.
The eldest of four children, Aliassan was pushed by his father, an orthopedic surgeon, to go into the medical profession. But he chose storytelling instead. And the father-son theme is never far from his thoughts as he writes (to wit, butcher?s knife = surgeon?s scalpel).
Neither is the role of women in traditional Muslim society. Aliassa grew up in a secular household; his mother, also a doctor, never wore the veil and only a few aunts were ?very pious,? he recalled when I met him at a Plateau Mount Royal bakery.
If his debut film has a message, it?s this: ?Muslim women want to be emancipated within their community. They don?t want to leave it; they want to change people?s mentalities in their own community. The idea is simply to be open-minded to others.
?It?s the message of Canada, to me: Live together.?
Boucherie Halal (Halal Butcher Shop) screens Wednesday at 9:20 p.m. and Friday at 7 p.m. at Quartier Latin. Writer-director Babek Aliassa will be there for both screenings. Tickets: $10. Information: www.ffm-montreal.org, and www.facebook.com/filmboucheriehalal.
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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