The main idea of this tribute is to showcase the two distinct axes of production, of the French-Canadian creator, Denis Côté. For every high-budget film he directs, a small self-improvised film or documentary accompanies it.
The films “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear”, “Boris Without Beatrice” and “Ghost Town Anthology”, are high-budget films, with comprehensive screenplays and professional actors. “Wilcox” on the other hand, and the documentaries—“Joy of Man’s Desiring”, concerning the relationship of man with hard-earned labour; and the observational documentary on the world of men’s bodybuilding “A Skin So Soft”—are low-budget films, made without pressures of production or analytical screenplays. They are more like “explorations”; where Côté seems to “take revenge”, on the film industry and its countless rules and expectations, set forth on its filmmakers.
Côté’s characters, exist either on the fringes of society, or are trapped inside their community—or even inside their own selves. Consequently, Côté’s work raises issues of diversity, otherness and an acceptance of the Other, or lack-of. The two ex-convicts in “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” struggle to rebuild their lives, in a cabin inside the woods. The certainties and beliefs, of well-to-do Boris, in “Boris Without Beatrice”, are greatly unsettled, with the arrival of a mysterious stranger. The ten main characters, of an inward-looking community in decline, in “Ghost Town Anthology”, are haunted by wounds of the past—unable to adapt themselves to the present. The unique character of “Wilcox” appears in want of creating, his own, exclusive utopia.
Côté combines fiction with documentary, with great prowess—his films are mainly concerned with asking, rather than answering, and address active audiences, who are called to fill-in, any narrative gaps, themselves.
Film selection, programming, introduction: Nina Veligradi
Watch Denis Côté's interview to Nina Veligradi, for the 11th AAGFF:
