Latest news with #AnneÉmond
CBC
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
It's the end of the world and Sudbury, Ontario is 'the last romantic city left on earth'
In Anne Émond's Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse in French), a lonesome Montrealer struggles with depression. Adam, a kennel owner played by Patrick Hivon, is staring down the end. He's often listening to the violent storms or earthquakes caused by the climate crisis raging just outside his window, or over the other end of a phone call. Or perhaps those sounds are more impressionistic, coming from Adam's own emotional turbulence. His crippling anxiety over the state of the world is at war with a tragic resignation. Adam fears the titular apocalypse. But what he's even more afraid of is his own state of mind – that maybe he couldn't even be bothered to save himself if given the chance. That is until the right woman comes along. Peak Everything is a romantic comedy that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival. It's also an expression of writer and director Émond's own battle with depression during the recent pandemic, an event that for many of us felt like the end of the world. "It was brutal," says Émond, recalling that period. "I had more time. More loneliness. I started to read articles, listen to podcasts and I was like, 'oh my God, we are fucked.' We are dying. It's almost over.'" A friend gave Émond a therapeutic lamp to help her cope — a device that packs sunlight in a box to help cheer up, in particular, Canadians who tend to really feel the January blues. "I put it on, under my [sun]glasses," Émond recalls. "And under the light, I started to imagine this love story; this very tender and sweet and fun story to first save myself." We're in Cannes, speaking about depression and apocalyptic conditions, under a canopy on the beach, with sunbathers lounging nearby and yachts overseeing all the action on the C ô te d'Azur in the distance. The festival has always provided a stunning contrast between its glitz, glam and sparkling scenery, and the heavier subject matter its films tend to deal with. On that front, this year's edition, which wraps Sunday, didn't disappoint. Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna are among the celebs who got the shutterbugs in a frenzy on the red carpet. Meanwhile the films at the festival dealt not only with depression (Peak Everything and Lynne Ramsay's viscerally dire Die, My Love, starring Lawrence and Pattinson) but also police violence and the protests that would erupt around the world (as recounted in French docu-thriller Dossier 137 and satirized in Ari Aster's Eddington) and the ongoing massacre in Gaza (documented in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk). Émond, who broke out over a decade ago with Nuit #1, another story about a seemingly impossible romance, is cheerily discussing her new film — essentially the French-Canadian answer to Punch-Drunk Love. "One of the greatest films of the past 25 years," says Emond of Paul Thomas Anderson's whimsical love letter to the French New Wave. "I think this film influenced all my films." As with Punch-Drunk Love, Amour Apocalypse begins when its depressed and socially awkward entrepreneur receives a package that magically brings relief to his discordant life. This time it isn't a harmonium but the same therapeutic lamp that inspired Émond's story. Adam fancifully forges a connection with a woman named Tina who answers the therapeutic lamp's tech support line, which he mistakenly but serendipitously rings looking for emotional support. For much of the movie, Tina (Piper Perabo) is just a voice on the other line, like a fantasy figure recalling Punch-Drunk Love 's biggest flaw. All the women in that earlier film are thinly drawn, existing only in relation to Adam Sandler's Barry Egan, as either emotional terrorists (Barry's sisters or the phone sex scam operator), or as the tenderly comforting object of affection played by Emily Mortimer, who enters the scene solely to rescue the main character from his anxieties. Émond is happy to play along in the same mode in Peak Everything, where the women in the film are either objects of affection or frustration, but only up to a point. "I invented this woman to help me to get better," Émond says, of the Tina character who we gradually discover is married, has children and is messy enough to leave everything behind to pursue a wildly passionate romance to satisfy her own emotional needs. "At some point, I was feeling better," Émond continues. "And I wanted to tell a true love story. In a true love story, it's two real people, with their problems, flaws and everything. Tina cannot just be a nice voice — sweet and everything. So I was like, 'No, no. She's a mother. Her husband drinks too much. She has problems. I thought it was interesting also that a woman that is 48 years old, can fall in love, go crazy for a man and leave everything behind." There's another layer to the reckless abandon. Émond doesn't just explore this romance as a hopeful balm during a climate crisis, but also as a Canadian allegory for Anglo-Franco unity. Adam is from Montreal. He soon discovers that Tina, this sensual and near mystical voice he hears on the other end of the phone, is actually in Sudbury. "The last romantic city in the world," says Émond, chuckling about her cheeky choice of locale. Émond finds a lot of humour in her inter-provincial romance, taking every opportunity to poke fun at not just at the people who populate her whimsical scenarios but also all of Ontario. When Adam pursues Tina, crossing over into Ontario, he's greeted by a giant Moose statue with a sign reading "Open for Business," the provincial slogan introduced by premiere Doug Ford. "It's so funny," Emond says about the cringey greeting, not realizing it was the Ford government who cooked it up. "Every time I come into Ontario, I'm like 'what a punchline.'" Emond makes sure to point out that she ridicules with affection and tenderness — whether the punchline is Ontario or her characters. But she also says the romance at the heart of her movie was meant to conjure a sense of Canadian unity, which feels especially pertinent at this moment. "Canada is funny these days," says Emond. "Since we're becoming the 51st state, we think a lot about what is Canada," she jokes. Émond, who grew up absorbing deeply separatist influences, parses the two solitudes when it comes to Quebec and the rest of Canada, not just in terms of the social and political, but also the cinema. Quebec films rarely depict the rest of Canada, nor do they often open in theatres outside their own province. And that exclusion often feels like a two way street. Rarely do we get a chance to see what Quebec cinema is cooking up in the rest of Canada, unless of course we fly to Cannes, where our national cinema is represented solely by the work of French-Canadians — as is the case at Cannes 2025. Émond's Amour Apocalypse joins Félix Dufour-Laperrière 's Death Does Not Exist and the animated shorts Bread Will Walk and Hypersensibility as the Quebecois films raising a maple leaf in Cannes. And she's happy to have her story about an impossible romance between Anglophones and Francophones be representative of some national unity. "I was like, 'why not,'" says Emond, singing a different tune from her earlier influences. "It's a bilingual country. It feels strange to be saying that."
CBC
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
A dystopian animated short featuring Jay Baruchel leads Canadian films at Cannes
Anxiety is the theme at this year's Cannes Film Festival. No, I'm not referring to the Doechii song (though I'm sure that'll be playing at all the afterparties); or the chatter around Trump's proposed 100 per cent tariff on international films; or programming like Ari Aster's Eddington, which taps into post pandemic divisiveness, and the final Mission: Impossible, where Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt wages war on an insidious AI. I'm talking about the Canadian films at Cannes this year, arriving on the Cote D'Azur like a dark cloud. There's Anne Émond's Peak Everything, about a man feeling emotionally crippled by the climate crisis. Its French title is Amour Apocalypse. Félix Dufour-Laperrière's animated feature Death Does Not Exist follows the tumultuous inner-life of a radical activist wrestling with existential decisions they must make to save society from where it's headed. In Martine Frossard's animated short Hypersensitive, a woman's fraught search for emotional healing sends her down a surreal rabbit hole that brings her closer to nature. And Bread Will Walk, Alex Boya's eerie and macabre animated short about two kids on a nightmarish journey, imagines the most fantastical take on what the world would be if we stay comfortable and complacent. The latter features Jay Baruchel, Canada's king of anxiety-riddled comedy, lending his vocals to the two children trying to hide from a world struck by a zombie-like plague caused by biochemically engineered food. People are mutating into bread. They're rounded up into concentration camps and fighting starvation by eating each other. It's a Hansel and Gretel meets Grapes of Wrath kind of story that taps into the same worry over industrial farming, mass production and commodification of our most bare necessities that Baruchel has grappled with in his apocalyptic documentary series We're All Gonna Die (Even Jay Baruchel). "It dovetails with my cynical worldview perfectly," Baruchel says, of his collaboration with Boya. Both are on a Zoom call with CBC Arts to discuss representing Canada at Cannes with a film that Baruchel describes as "Brothers Grimm with a healthy dose of 21st century nihilism." We're a couple weeks out from the festival. Baruchel is calling in from his Toronto home, sporting a Montreal Canadians hoodie and cap, and bringing his boisterous and huggable energy to the conversation. Boya, is at his National Film Board (NFB) desk in Montreal, surrounded by film props and gadgets. Boya hoists up to his camera a creepy animatronic of the main character in Bread Will Walk and a massive, mutated melange of actual bread, which he experimented with when he considered making his film using stop-motion animation. "That's disgusting," Baruchel says. One of the reasons Boya abandoned the stop motion approach is because his attempts at filming an animatronic character turning into bread, by using a translucent oven and actual yeast, risked burning down the NFB. "There's all kinds of biohazardous iterations of the project," says Boya, with a mischievous grin. Boya is an experimenter. He tinkers with all the ways he can push technology for his art. As we're talking, he's got a prototype robotics arm strapped to his wrist, which he's using to study "muscle memory alongside temporality" for a project where robotics meets cognitive science and animation/art. He regularly drops head-spinning concepts into our conversation, which would be intimidating if he weren't so gentle and genuine about it all. "He is whatever the exact opposite of full of shit is," is Baruchel's take on Boya. Bread Will Walk is actually drawn from his graphic novel about a walking bread pandemic, The Mill, which Boya originally published — right before the pandemic had everyone stuck at home baking bread — in NFT form. He says he was exploring "database storytelling" and atomizing his story into a world-building project. When approaching Bread Will Walk, Boya even tried on the latest AI tools, to see if they could push the animation further. "I had an open mind with regards to a lot of these new technologies," he says. "But to do exactly what we were doing, it looked better when a human being does it. "You realize that the authorship of a human being speaking to another one, a lot of that happens in the invisible space between the frames," Boya continues, explaining the relationship to the screen and its audience. "That is really a communication between two people. Can I have two robots talk over a coffee? What's the point, right? You can have a coffee shop with two language models talking to each other and the coffee is going to get cold. There's something existentially innate about speaking as humans that is embedded in storytelling and embedded in filmmaking and animation." Keeping humanity at the centre also happens to be Bread Will Walking 's whole aesthetic. The film's evocative hand drawn animation, all bleeding earthy colours and sinewy lines, moves like one continuous shot, where it appears less like the characters are roaming through the world, and more like the environment is mutating around them. They remain the constant in a dehumanizing landscape. The other constant is Baruchel, who voices not only the two kids but all the other hostile characters who enter their orbit. It's a task that Baruchel admits stretched his vocal talents, even though he's really seasoned at this kind of gig. Long before Baruchal spent a decade behind the mic as Hiccup in the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, he was a voice actor in animation and French to English dubs. In fact, one of his earliest gigs was another NFB animated short called One Divided by Two: Kids and Divorce, a film about how triggering divorce can be, which itself was pretty triggering for Baruchel. "I was a 12-year-old kid whose parents' marriage was imploding before my eyes," he says. "[It] was more of a bummer than even this one." The stretch for Baruchel this time around was the singing during a crucial moment in Bread Will Walk, which he describes as both a scary and humbling proposition. "They were cool enough to say if you don't want to sing you don't have to," he says. "But of course, I am a narcissist and a whore, so I was like, 'of course.' … Everybody there was wonderful but good lord, did I ever feel like a guy stuck on a mountain." For Boya, Baruchel's struggle on that mountain, his anxiety during the process, becomes part of the text, and the humanity between the frames. It also reinforces his reasoning for having one actor voice everyone, as if the whole film was an expression of a singular inner monologue. "You're kind of in this limbic state," says Boya. "The character is almost talking to themselves and having all these characters within themselves." Boya then addresses Baruchel about his performance directly: "The tension of having you defy yourself, define yourself and then fight with yourself in this procedural, adversarial learning of carbon-based matter is quite special to see. And quite special to see documented."
Globe and Mail
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
‘It's the dream': Cannes showcases Canadian filmmakers outside the old guard
On the opening day of the Cannes Film Festival, the red-and-white Canada Pavilion, located on the calm and pristine shores of the French Riviera, is a quiet oasis of laptop typing and polite networking. Especially contrasted with the boom-boom-boom thud of the American Pavilion a few tents down, where the atmosphere was thick with a smiley but nervy 'Do I know you?' attitude. The parallel moods on the Croisette underlined Canada's here-but-not-in-your-face presence at the 78th edition of the world's most prestigious film festival. After several recent editions of Cannes in which Canadian cinema's more name-brand auteurs stood tall – think of last year's festival featuring legacy-defining work from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds) and Guy Maddin (Rumours) – this year's Canadian contingent offers a quieter, more sneak-up-on-you energy from artists either emerging or long on the cusp. Of the three Canadian filmmakers whose work is competing in the festival's sidebar program Directors' Fortnight – Anne Émond's doom-tinged romcom Amour Apocalypse (Peak Everything), Felix Dufour-Laperrière's intense feature-length cartoon Le Mort n'existe pas (Death Does Not Exist), and Alex Boya's darkly whimsical animated short titled Bread Will Walk – each director is a Cannes newbie. 'I think it's a good sign for Canadian cinema if filmmakers are being invited to Cannes for the first or second time fairly early in their careers,' says Toronto International Film Festival chief executive Cameron Bailey, who is in town this week not only scoping out films for this fall's 50th edition of TIFF, but laying the groundwork for the launch of Toronto's official content market in 2026. 'It's always great when there's a Cronenberg or an Egoyan, but if there's only that, then that's a bad sign for Canadian filmmakers.' Quebecois animator Dufour-Laperrière knows well that he's not carrying the imprimatur of a Denis Villeneuve or Denys Arcand – and he wouldn't expect to, working in the field of adult-skewing animation. Which makes the invitation to debut his work at Cannes all the more important to him, and those of his fellow Canadian artists. 'It's breaking the boundaries. There's no public audience for adult animation, it doesn't exist. So it's a real pleasure to screen an adult animated feature in a general cinema context,' says the filmmaker, who began working on Death Does Not Exist, which follows the shattered life of a political activist, more than a decade ago. 'I'm joyful about having the opportunity to share this kind of work with moviegoers in a festival that permits it to stand out.' Canadian filmmaker Dominic Desjardins, who is also in Cannes for the first time with his impressively soul-crushing virtual-reality project The Dollhouse (a co-production with Luxembourg), possesses a more uniquely un-Canadian sense of unbridled enthusiasm. 'Being in Cannes is huge! It's the dream, you know?' says the filmmaker, who spent years working on the VR project out of his small Toronto office with his wife, producer Rayne Zukerman. 'This is a festival for creators who are not working for commercial purposes, but who just feel a powerful drive to bring a story into the world. Having a venue like Cannes, and being invited there, is saying that there's not just a market for this, but a need in the cultural landscape.' Although Canadian filmmakers have a wealth of opportunities to showcase their work at home, the international connections that a Cannes premiere can deliver are unparalleled. 'The mission is to reach out to Canadians, but also the world. And on that level, you can make so many connections once the same content is seen from the angle of an international audience,' says Bread Will Walk director Boya, whose short neatly subverts the zombie genre and features the voice of Jay Baruchel. 'You get to develop a relationship to your work in a more cubistic way – you can look at it from different angles and learn from how it's been viewed by audiences from one culture to the next.' Naturally, all of the Canadian titles at Cannes are premiering under the shadow of tariffs and other cultural politics seeping out of the United States – still the dominant force both in the global entertainment industry and this year's festival (up to and including the American Pavilion's soundtrack). But for the Canadian talent on hand, the tension might in fact be healthy. 'As an artist, we create environments of exchange in new terms,' says Boya. 'I think there are two options that you can take: be responsive to the backdrop of those dynamics, or nurture the things that you're fostering, the forums that you're trying to build as an artist, and it will just naturally co-exist with the overarching zeitgeist. 'These tectonic plates, they'll always be clashing – but you're building something that floats on its own gravitational pull. That's the value of creators connecting with audiences and other creators. Focus on the storytelling.'
