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The Eighth Floor

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September 13 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

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Le huitième étage, jours de révolte

Dir. Pedro Ruiz, Canada/Cuba, 2024, Spanish & French with English subtitles, 91 min

Director Pedro Ruiz in attendance!

The Eighth Floor is a fascinating hybrid cinematographic work mixing autobiography and fiction, about one of the most singular characters of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ): Jacques Lanctôt. The FLQ Crisis of October 1970 marked a period of intense political and social upheaval in Quebec, but the details of Lanctôt and the other members exile in Cuba are not widely known. A loose adaptation of Lanctôt’s memoir Les plages de l’exil (2010), the film chronicles Lanctôt’s return to his eighth-floor room in the Hotel Nacional in Havana. Interviews, re-enactments, archival footage, and stories of key intellectual figures of the time, such as Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, Uruguayan essayist Eduardo Galeano, and Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, provide a provocative glimpse into the revolutionary thoughts of the period.

The Cinematheque

1131 Howe Street Vancouver
Vancouver, BC V6Z 2L7 Canada

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The Eighth Floor.

Pedro Ruiz

Screenwriter, producer, and director known for Animal Tropical à Montréal (2006), a portrait of writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez; The gentle drift of a child from Haiti (2009), which won the Audience Award at RIDM for its wild voyage into the imagination of writer Dany Laferrière; Philémon Chante Habana (2012), an intimate odyssey of singer-songwriter Philémon Cimon; and, Havana, From On High (2019), which won the 2020 Canadian Academy of Cinema and Television Award for its dazzling and poetic portrait of the people who live in the canopy of Havana. His most recent film, The Eighth Floor (2023), is a poetic journey in the footsteps of Jacques Lanctôt, a former member of the FLQ, who traces his forced exile in Cuba in the 1970s.