Seventeen-year-old Jeff, an aspiring filmmaker, is invited by his friend Max and his family to stay in the isolated lodge belonging to Blake, an award-winning film director. As Jeff tries to navigate his awkward crush on his friend’s older sister, Aloicha, he witnesses the vicious, ego-driven, alcohol-fueled interactions between the renowned auteur and his former collaborator, Max’s screenwriter father, Albert. Surrounded by monumental mountains and shimmering lakes, the party veers between moments of elation and cruelty, unease and palpable danger.
Acclaimed Quebecois director Philippe Lesage (The Demons; Genesis) returns with a tense, mesmerizing tour de force that’s both agonizing and cathartic. Parallel, painful generational stories play out both in the seemingly infinite wilderness and across the dinner table; the slow burn of mounting dread punctuated with electrifying, deeply unsettling moments of feral intensity.
Philippe Lesage
Noah Parker, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré, Arieh Worthalter, Paul Ahmarani, Sophie Desmarais, Antoine Marchand-Gagnon
Canada/France
2024
In French and English with English subtitles
Grand Prix: Generation 14plus, Berlin 2024
Book Tickets
Thursday April 17
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Producer
Galilé Marion-Gauvin
Screenwriter
Philippe Lesage
Cinematography
Balthazar Lab
Editor
Mathieu Bouchard-Malo
Production Design
Geneviève Huot
Also in This Series
Canadian Film Week spotlights 18 features, including six Vancouver premieres and four brand new films from BC filmmakers, plus returning classics, new favourites, and free screenings on National Canadian Film Day.
Sweet Summer Pow Wow
After the local hit The Great Salish Heist, writer-director Darrell Dennis proves his versatility with this charming love story about two young people who meet cute on BC's Pow Wow circuit. Her mom wants her to become a lawyer, but Jinny loves to dance...
Village Keeper
In Karen Chapman’s sensitive debut feature, a widowed mother desperate to shelter her teenage daughter and son from a surge of gun violence in Toronto takes it upon herself to cleanse the blood from crime scenes in her Lawrence Heights neighbourhood.
The Barbarian Invasions
Arcand's belated sequel finds his erstwhile "sensual socialist" facing terminal cancer and trying to make peace with his financier son. This is one of the most acclaimed Canadian films ever made, garlanded all over the world.
Incandescence
Filmed across the Okanagan before, during and after several devastating fires by veteran non-fiction filmmakers Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper (Metamorphosis; ScaredSacred), Incandescence is a mesmerizing cinematic contemplation of the power of wildfires.
Crocodile Eyes
Drawing on home movies and her immediate family relations, Ingrid Veninger sets out to make a film comprising 100 "real moments": birth, death, and the in-between. Minutes mundane and momentous, personal histories, memories shared.