MISSION

The Festival international de la littérature (FIL) is an annual French-language, multidisciplinary, national and international literature festival whose mission is to promote literature, books and reading to all audiences. FIL is a ten-day festival that takes place every fall in twenty Montreal locations such as theaters, cinemas and public spaces. FIL is also now a year-round event with tours throughout the province of Quebec and abroad.

As a producer and broadcaster of literature events, FIL offers, in each of its editions, an original and audacious program whose excellence is quite comparable to what offers the best theater, dance or music festivals in Quebec. He is known for far-reaching literature performances starring Fanny Ardant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jane Birkin and Arthur H. , creations as Poésie, sandwichs et autres soirs qui penchent and tributes to Jack Kerouac, Gabrielle Roy, Réjean Ducharme or Nelly Arcan, as well as many other events where literature is staged through music and pictures.

In order to reach different audiences, the FIL program is always extremely diversified: alongside the literature shows, presented in the best theaters in Montreal, FIL offers many free literary activities such as exhibitions, film screenings, meetings, a youth day, ephemeral installations or ambulatories, as well as many activities aimed at audiences usually hardly affected by culture and literature, like people experiencing homelessness, disability or illiteracy.

GREAT OBJECTIVES

• Promote all literatures while giving a prominent place to Quebec literature and its authors;
• Offer to various audiences a variety of high-level literature performances at affordable prices;
• Count on the contribution and inputs of different art forms as ways of raising awareness to the importance of reading while reaching out to all audiences (children, adolescents, adults) in places that are not traditionally associated with literature as theaters, cinemas and public spaces;
• Develop partnership projects with stakeholders from various literature, cultural, community and educational fields to promote reading as an instrument of socio-economic and cultural development;
• Create a network of sustainable collaborations with other literary and cultural organizations - national and foreign - to promote the circulation of performances outside the festival and throughout countrysides, particularly in areas with sparsely bookshops;
• Encourage meetings between writers (Quebecers, French-speaking Canadians and from various cultures, native and foreign) as well as between writers and artists from other disciplines, resulting in subsequent joint creative projects and invitations to participate in other literary or cultural events;
• Contribute to the improvement of the socio-professional conditions of writers and artists by offering them a place conducive to the creation and / or circulation of original and unpublished works;
• Develop artistic partnerships with other cultural or artistic organizations as co-producer and / or co-casters.

STORYLINE

The Festival international de la littérature(FIL) was created by the Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois (UNEQ) in 1994, at a time when there were few literature events except book fairs. After celebrating ten years of existence of its festival, the UNEQ decided that it was time for FIL to have its own structure and it thus became autonomous in 2004. For more than 15 years, the FIL has been standing on its two feet, while being grateful to writers who helped creating a festival dedicated to literature.

From 1994 to 2019, nearly 5,000 writers and artists from all disciplines, from all generations and from all backgrounds, have participated in more than 1,000 different events that have allowed some 200,000 literary festival-goers to rediscover famous authors while discovering new ones, through forms that are constantly reinvented, audacious and original.

FIL has always been a producer and broadcaster; it thus assumes the risks associated with the creation of original and unpublished works while presenting the best literature performances created by other Quebec, Canadian and foreign organizations. Partnerships with community organizations and institutions, as well as a literature mediation program help to bring a sustainable social impact on Montreal life by promoting reading as a source of pleasure, but also as a tool for exchange, sharing, discovery and evolution.

Over the last five years, FIL has developed expertise in touring its productions in Montreal and Quebec while participating in missions abroad, including in Haiti, Paris, Geneva, Brussels and most recently in Berlin. During its edition of 2019, FIL hosted foreign broadcasters from France, Belgium and Germany to allow greater exposure of Quebec literature.