Canadian writers whose sense of place infuses their work include short-story author Alice Munro and novelists Douglas Coupland and Margaret Atwood. Playwright Michel Tremblay, an important dramatist, grew up in Montréal's Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood and uses that setting for much of his work. His Les Belles-SSurs, written in 1965, introduced the lives of working-class francophone Québécois to the world. The openly gay writer continues to live and work in Montréal. (Meanwhile, Atwood has even branched out into product invention to help far-flung writers: She has come up with something called a "LongPen," which allows authors to have book signings from a distance, using a robot to "sign" a book after the author makes a signature on a computer screen. The gizmo debuted at the Nicholas Hoare bookstore in Montréal in 2006.)
Writing from the perspective of a minority within a minority, the late Jewish Anglophone Mordecai Richler inveighed against the excesses of Québec's separatists and language zealots in a barrage of books and critical essays in newspapers and magazines. Montréal journalist Taras Grescoe's Sacré Blues (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2001), which carries the subtitle "An Unsentimental Journey Through Québec," presents an affectionate but balanced assessment of his adopted province.
Montréal has a strong showing of innovative alternative rock bands, including Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. (The band Of Montreal, however, is from Athens, Georgia.) Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright grew up in Montréal and got his start at city clubs, while singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen grew up in the city's Westmount neighborhood and attended McGill University.
Many U.S. films are made across the border for financial reasons, even when their American locales are important parts of the stories (see, for instance, Brokeback Mountain, which was filmed in Alberta). Québécois films -- made in the province, in French, for Québec audiences -- can be difficult to track down outside the country. A new initiative announced in spring 2007 called "Eléphant: mémoire du cinéma québécois" (www.elephant.canoe.ca) should help with that: It plans to provide extensive information on all 800 Québec-made feature films at a website, and to make them available on Canadian television on-demand. Recent features worth seeking out are Jean-Marc Vallée's box-office hit C.R.A.Z.Y., a gay coming-of-age story; Louise Archambault's Familia, about mothers and daughters; and Sarah Polley's Away From Her, with Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's.
