What happens when you combine a passion for both baseball and cinema?
The answer: a film festival featuring as many films about baseball as a true fan could hope for.
“Match Parfait: Le Baseball Au Cinéma” opened Thursday night and will run until July 10 at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal.
The seeds for the fest were planted two years ago when Montreal screenwriter, editor and author Carl Dubé, pitched the idea to the Cinémathèque and it accepted.
Dubé, driven by his love of the game and sadness over the loss of his hometown Montreal Expos, went to work securing dozens of terrific films–dramas, documentaries, even rare footage from the days before talking pictures.
In the process, he scored a couple of coups, one being the participation of filmmaker Bill Morrison, who recently uncovered long-lost footage of the 1919 World Series, an event forever known as the Black Sox Scandal because eight members of the Chicago White Sox took it upon themselves to cheat and dump it. Morrison’s discovery will be screened.
The other is Dennis Martinez, who many feel produced the greatest moment in the history of the now-departed Expos when he threw a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on July 28, 1991.
A perfect game is a breathtaking event. A pitcher allows no one–absolutely no one–to reach base.
How rare is a perfect game?
Over the 135 years of Major League Baseball history and over 200,000 games played, only 23 have ever been pitched. No pitcher has ever thrown more than one.
Dubé convinced Martinez to participate at a giant outdoor screening of his perfect game this Sunday in a north-end Montreal park.
“Perfect Game” translated in French to “Match Parfait”
“Match Parfait: Le Baseball Au Cinéma”
Dubé is not a man who thinks small.
He joined RCI by phone from his office in Montreal.
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