Ever since his first feature film J’ai tué ma mère premiered at Cannes in 2009, where it received an eight-minute standing ovation and three awards, every film from the prolific and precocious 28 year-old Québécois director Xavier Dolan has generated significant buzz. A recipient of numerous international awards, Dolan has recently taken his career into genre filmmaking (with Tom à la ferme, which premiered at Venice and garnered the prestigious FRIPESCI prize) and to an international level, with his first English-language feature The Death and Life of John F. Donovan now in post-production.
Dolan has undoubtedly been a crucial player in the film festival circuit of the past seven years, and an eloquent spokesperson for Québec’s national cinema within international spheres. Dolan’s involvement with directing, producing, screenwriting, editing, costume design and English subtitling and dubbing make Dolan an exemplar of auteur cinema. Meanwhile, his “very Québécois” profile, combined with the wide circulation of his films in foreign markets, continues to enhance the relevance of Québec’s cultural specificity in wider frameworks of film reception.
As the first book-length anthology on Xavier Dolan, this ReFocus International Directors volume seeks to make an intervention on the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas, and to use Dolan’s cinema as a departure point to reconsider the position of Québec film and cultural imaginary within a global cinematic culture. The Films of Xavier Dolan will be one of the scholarly editions to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press in the ReFocus series on international directors. Series editors are Robert Singer, PhD and Gary D. Rhodes, PhD.
The editor is accepting submissions on any aspect of Dolan’s oeuvre, but especially chapters on the following topics:
- The international reception of Dolan’s films
- Local/Global reception
- Millennial filmmaking and reception, as it relates to Dolan
- Millennial queer filmmaking
- Millennial nostalgia in Dolan’s films
- Specific films, as they relate to any of the above or the following additional topics: sexuality/intimacy, language/accents, women/motherhood, Québec cinema, international circuits/film festivals
Please send your 250-750 word proposal and CV to andreelafontaine@icloud.com by May 30, 2017. I welcome initial email enquiries to discuss possible proposals.
Final submissions will be approximately 6000 to 8000 words, in English, referenced in Chicago endnote style, and submitted by October 15, 2017.
Andrée Lafontaine, PhD, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Aichi University, Nagoya