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Heretic has acquired world sales rights to “Nobody’s Violence,” the 17th feature from prolific Canadian auteur Denis Côté which world premieres in main competition at the Locarno Film Festival.
The director’s latest
sees him reuniting with actor Larissa Corriveau, the star of previous features including “Social Hygiene,” “That Kind of Summer” and the 2023 Locarno premiere “Mademoiselle Kenopsia.” Here she stars as Mira, a solitary woman working on behalf of a mysterious organization that offers assisted death to desperate individuals.
With seemingly no plan in life and no direction to guide her, Mira falls in with Madeleine and Ludo, two free-spirited hedonists living deep in the forest. There she begins to question her wandering life and reassess the dark pacts she forges with the desperate souls who seek out her services.
“Nobody’s Violence” is written and directed by Côté and produced by Guillaume Vasseur and Gabrielle Tougas-Fréchette, with the participation of Sodec and Téléfilm Canada and the support of Quebec’s Crédit d’Impôt Cinféma et Télévisio – Gestion Sodec, Canada’s Crédits d’Impôts, Télé-Quebec, H264 and Heretic. It stars Corriveau alongside Philippe Rebbot, Xavier Bergeron, Gabrielle Lazure and Pierrette Robitaille.
The film continues Côté’s long-running love affair with Locarno, beginning with his fifth feature, “Curling,” which was awarded at the prestigious Swiss fest in 2010 before traveling to more than 80 festivals. It marks the director’s first appearance there since receiving a life-saving kidney transplant in 2023, after he spent more than a decade battling a debilitating kidney illness.
Speaking to Variety on the eve of this year’s festival, Côté opened up about his love for low-budget, indie filmmaking, why he’s still not sold on Hollywood, and how it feels to get a new lease on life, saying: “I never expected to live such a miracle.”
You wrote this screenplay during the final and most difficult year of your illness, a time of uncertainty when you were living in a gray zone between life and death. How did that experience shape the creation of this film?
I really don’t want to make films about my personal life. I’m not very good with that, even though that’s the cinemas of today — people are only talking about their coming of age or their traumas or their family. I’m very bad at that. Maybe I’m from another generation, but it’s fun to make a film that talks about yourself, but it’s absolutely not about yourself. Mira is created in that way. She has no clue where she’s going. My condition was kind of [similar to hers]. It’s a liminal space.
I did “Mademoiselle Kenopsia” when I was very sick, and that film was about liminal spaces. This script is still about all these in-betweens that were stuck in my head. I didn’t know what dialysis meant. I didn’t know what a transplant was. What’s on the other side? Because for 10, 15 years, I didn’t know what it was to be healthy. I was just living with all these toxins in my head and in my body, and I was just tired. I imagined the script that way. It’s something you can’t grasp. So it’s a film about myself, but it has nothing to do with my life.
How did your long illness affect you as a filmmaker?
When you have kidney insufficiency, you can function. You’re just always tired. And there are some doctors telling you you’re going towards something very dark, but you function. So I made all these films with my condition. It was hard to travel, but it’s not a very clear disease. The symptoms are not very clear. You know you’re in a dangerous place, but it’s so abstract. And that’s how I created this film. I didn’t know where I was going. And then suddenly somebody offered me a kidney, and it was a miracle.
Was the process of making “Nobody’s Violence” different than how you would normally approach a film? Did Mira come to you in a different way than other protagonists?
I knew I was talking about myself, but I didn’t want it to be very explicit. The way I work, I never see the end of the script. I just write, and it’s blank pages, one after the other. My films are more like objects and less like clear narratives and organized propositions. You just don’t know where this character is going.
For me, she’s in an in-between situation. I created this script thinking of me waiting to get a new life. That was the whole point of the film. The floating center — Mira, not asking questions, just drifting, drifting, drifting. I love that kind of cinema. And then she has to do one thing. We don’t know what, but sometimes you need to do one thing to just jump into the void and then find a new life.
I love being lost in front of my own creation. I don’t even know what this film is. I don’t even know who that character is. Who are these people? I know it’s a bit dumb to say it like that, but I love it. You feel that the object you created can have its own life without you. You’re totally lost in front of what you created. I love that feeling.
You’ve talked about how you miss narrative freedom in cinema, and how you believe your own work could benefit from more of it. Why?
It’s getting harder to make those films. But some filmmakers are still so free, and [I admire] what they’re doing. The problem in our industry is that in those rich countries where we live, you need to ask for money from the ministries of culture, and you need to [explain] everything you’re doing. You need to put it on paper. You need to fight for this freedom because they ask you for very solid and tight scripts before giving you the money. You cannot just write something on a piece of paper, and they’re going to give you the money. In the end, I’m trying to shoot this film with the most improvisational moments I can find, this 16mm stuff and this editing that is ’70s, rough looking. Those are the parts where I find my liberty. I’m an experimental filmmaker, and I never experiment enough. You have these crews of 35 people around you, you have tight schedules, so I’m always fighting to find more liberty.
Do you ever see yourself moving in a more commercial direction? Would you want to work in Hollywood?
Maybe if you would have asked me 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, during “Curling” or “Vic and Flo” — those older films. I’ve had these discussion with Denis Villeneuve, or Philippe Falardeau, and they told me how it works. You just stay home. You read scripts. And if you like it, you tell your agent and those films happen. For me, it’s just a mysterious planet. But I was curious.
Nowadays, I would tell you it’s over. I’m 52, I have made 17 films. I have my brand of — not “experimental” filmmaking. But it’s very hard to approach a 52-year-old guy and try to bring him towards the light, or the more narrative aspects of things. I could not write these scripts. I would be completely alien in that industry. So nowadays, I’m not looking to be something other than who I am now. I’m going to push the envelope to make freer and freer projects. I know where I want to be, and I think I am where I want to be, and it has nothing to do with anything narrative or commercial. I lost connection with that world.
It’s been three years since your kidney transplant. How do you think the experience of being, you know, at death’s door shaped your approach not only toward life, but also toward filmmaking? Do you look at cinema and your work differently now?
When I was sick, I don’t think it was conscious, but I was still fighting against time. It was not very concrete, but people were telling me, ‘You make a film a year, and you don’t have to.’ And then I would give answers like, “I don’t have kids.I don’t have a house. I don’t have a car. I don’t have a driver’s license. I have nothing else than cinema in my life.” So I had the luxury to make a film every year. Even when “Mademoiselle Kenopsia” was made, I had 15% kidney function left. I could not even stand up, and we were making this stupid film. It was an unnecessary project. So why was I making that?
Since the transplant, [that feeling] is gone. It’s my old life, and I cannot remember what was before. Maybe I’m not spiritual enough or philosophical enough about the whole thing, but I’m a very concrete person. What kind of new philosophy can I tell you about the whole experience? I’m still not sure. But since I’m healthy, it’s my second project, and I just finished a new script, and I’m about to maybe shoot a small film soon. So it’s the same life. Cinema is a daily grind. You’re just getting groceries and making films.
