h264 is pleased to announce that the film Violence du corps de l’autre, written and directed by Denis Côté will be presented as a world premiere and in official competition during the 79th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival, (Switzerland) which will take place from August 5 to 15. The Quebec filmmaker will therefore return to the prestigious Swiss festival, where his first feature film, The Nordic States, won the Golden Leopard (video) for best film in 2005 before She Wants Chaos, his third feature film, won the Directing Prize in 2008 and Curling, his fifth feature film, the Directing Prize and the Leopard for best male performance awarded to Emmanuel Bilodeau in 2010.
»I am very happy to return to Locarno in Competition, 9 years later. Your skin is so smooth. Our film fits perfectly with the idea of daring cinema that the festival has always defended and put forward. Locarno is a bit like coming home. »
Mira is a lonely woman of few words. She travels the roads to meet desperate people with whom she seems to have formed strange death pacts. Without an apparent address, she stops at Madeleine and Ludo, two free and happy spirits living in the forest. On break from her missions, disconcerted by the dazzling encounter with an excessive and intriguing young man, she takes advantage of this stopover to question her wanderings and reevaluate her dark contracts.
Violence of the Body of the Other stars Larissa Corriveau, whose fifth collaboration with Denis Côté after Répertoire des Villes Disappears (2019), Hygiène sociale (2021), Un été comme ça (2022) and Mademoiselle Kenopsia (2023) as well as, among others, the French actor Philippe Rebbot (À bicyclette, Trois fois rien!), Xavier Bergeron (The Return of Anna Brodeur), Gabrielle Lazure, Pierrette Robitaille and Eve Pressault (Nelly).
Denis Côté was born in New Brunswick, Canada. In the 90s, he shot around fifteen short films. He was a journalist and film critic on the radio and for a cultural weekly before directing his first feature film The Nordic States in 2005. In 2009, Carcasses was presented at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight while Curling, his fifth feature film, won honors at the Locarno Festival in 2010. Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (2013) won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in Germany for its innovation. More than 15 feature films later, via an independent and atypical path, Denis Côté’s unique films have been shown in hundreds of cinematographic events in addition to being the subject of around forty retrospectives around the world. In 2024, the filmmaker received the Albert-Tessier Prize, the highest distinction given to a Quebec filmmaker, awarded by the Government of Quebec.
For his seventeenth feature film, Denis Côté surrounded himself with Vincent Biron as photo director, Marie-Pier Fortier as artistic director, Stephen de Oliveira on sound, Caroline Bodson on costumes and Terence Chotard on editing. After Mademoiselle Kenopsia, this is also her second collaboration with producers Gabrielle Tougas-Fréchette and Guillaume Vasseur.
Produced by OISEAU PAS DE S (Gabrielle Tougas-Fréchette and Guillaume Vasseur), with the financial participation of SODEC and TELEFILM CANADA, Violence du corps de l’autre is distributed in Canada by h264. International sales are handled by Heretic. The film will be released in the coming months.