Denis Coté: Last News

Jennie Punter Pakistani Canadian filmmaker Anam Abbas has won the Canadian Media Producers Assn.’s 2023 Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Award, it was announced Sept. 7 at the Indiescreen Awards, the opening event of the Toronto International Film Festival’s industry conference at Glenn Gould Studios. Abbas’ latest feature is writer and director Zarrar Kahn’s feature debut “In Flames,” a Pakistani Canadian horror-drama about a Karachi woman and her mother who are beset by malevolent figures from their past after the family patriarch dies.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The trailer has debuted for “Mademoiselle Kenopsia,” the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté, who won awards at Berlin Film Festival with “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” and Locarno with “Curling.” “Mademoiselle Kenopsia” had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival this month, and will premiere in North America at next month’s Toronto Film Festival in the Wavelengths section, which was unveiled Friday. H264 is handling international sales.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Canada-based movie distributor and aggregator H264 is launching a world sales arm with the acquisition of “Red Rooms,” which has its world premiere next week in the Crystal Globe Competition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The company is focused on festival-driven, innovative films. “Red Rooms,” directed by Quebec filmmaker Pascal Plante (“Fake Tattoos,” “Nadia, Butterfly”), is a cyber-thriller questioning the collective fascination with murderers. It will screen at Karlovy Vary on July 4, and will then open the Fantasia Film Festival on July 20 for its North American premiere. Montréal-based H264 is also ramping up its international slate by adding “Mademoiselle Kenopsia,” from filmmaker Denis Côté, who won awards at Berlin with “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” and Locarno with “Curling.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Locarno Film Festival is launching a first-of-its-kind contest, offering a free complete restoration service to a selected vintage cinema classic. The contest is part of The Swiss fest’s Heritage Online program that was launched in 2021 when its Locarno Pro industry side branched out into vintage cinema creating a platform that serves as a database of film titles that premiered prior to 2005. The goal of the fest dedicated to indie cinema is to play an active role in restoring older films to their former glory and also to become a business facilitator between rights holders and classic film distributors, streaming platforms and other outlets.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“You are not here for a cure,” the founder of a 26-day sexual therapy retreat tells the small group of women enrolled in her program at the outset of “That Kind of Summer.” Laying out the ground rules for the sensitive self-awareness exercise that follows — a loosely structured hiatus from unhealthy temptations, designed for those whose out-of-control impulses have made their lives unmanageable — she reassures, “You are not forbidden any sexual thoughts or behavior here. You are not sick.”Shot on grainy Super 16 with the kind of unsteady handheld aesthetic that suggests the cameraperson really ought to get their inner ear checked, Denis Côté’s radically nonjudgmental “let’s talk about sex” drama looks and feels like a documentary — at least, it could pass as one until a giant CG tarantula crawls up the wall while one of the women is masturbating late in the game.

An isolated house in the country, a small tribe of peculiar characters mostly keeping a wary distance from each other: That Kind of Summer (Un Ete Comme Ca) is a film set up perfectly for the pandemic era. The bonus zinger is that the house is a live-in retreat for supposedly, or maybe just possibly, recovering sex addicts. Nobody leaves, and everyone talks dirty. Denis Cote, the prolific Quebecois provocateur, must have been hugging himself when he thought of that one.

Ben Croll As he took questions both onstage and later out on the street following a Sunday night screening at the Torino Film Festival – where his film, “The Noise of Engines,” played in competition – director Philippe Grégoire found himself on the opposite end of an interaction he knew all too well.Like so many filmmakers, Grégoire himself was once an eager festivalgoer, often staying late after a screening to hear this or that director speak about their craft; in a move perhaps less common, Grégoire could pinpoint one of those moments – a Q&A with fellow Quebecois director Denis Côté, to be precise – as the exact point he decided to step behind the camera.“I was in the same exact place,” he tells Variety. “I had to take a decision.

Jessica Kiang Veering between profundity, faux profundity and a faintly discernible mockery of those who might mistake one for the other, Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté administers a thimbleful of COVID-era potion with “Social Hygiene,” which brought him the best director prize in the Berlinale Encounters sidebar (shared with Ramon and Silvan Zürcher for “The Girl and the Spider”). The film largely amounts to stagey scenes of two people bellowing petty philosophies at each other across a blustery meadow.

Berlinale Encounters hated to Variety about his latest feature before its world premiere on March 3. Cote, in interview, flows.

Naman Ramachandran The Berlin Film Festival has revealed 12 titles from 16 countries that will compete in the festival’s Encounters strand, including Denis Côté’s “Social Hygiene” from Canada, Alice Diop’s “We” from France, and Fern Silva’s “Rock Bottom Riser” from the U.S.The selections also take in “As I Want” (Egypt/France/Norway/Palestine) by Samaher Alqadi; “Azor” (Switzerland/France/Argentina) by Andreas Fontana; “The Beta Test” (U.S./U.K.) by Jim Cummings, PJ McCabe; and “Bloodsuckers (Germany) by Julian Radlmaier.Also competing will be “The Girl and the Spider” (Switzerland) by Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher; “District Terminal” (Iran/Germany) by Bardia Yadegari, Ehsan Mirhosseini; “Moon, 66 Questions” (Greece/France) by Jacqueline

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentFollowing hard on the heels of the film’s selection for this year’s Berlin Film Festival Encounters section, director Denis Côté has shared a first trailer for his new movie “Social Hygiene,” the latest from the Canadian director who won a Silver Bear for 2013’s “Vic+Flo Saw a Bear.”At first glance, if the trailer is anything to go by, “Social Hygiene” seems at first glance a perfect pandemic movie: characters talking much more than two meters apart in a fresh verdant Canadian countryside.Côté, however, wrote the movie — even down to its title — in 2015 when alone on holiday in Sarajevo “in a state of alienation.” The only COVID-19 connection is the film’s expression of a desire to flee and to

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent“Traveller,” the first major screen credit of “The Crying Games’” Neil Jordan, Canadian Denis Coté’s debut feature “Drifting States” and Arturo Ripstein’s “The Place Without Limits,” a 1977 Mexican LGBTQ movie, are three titles featured in the inaugural lineup of the Locarno Film Festival’s Heritage Online section.Another, 1954 Egyptian transgender comedy “Miss Hanafi,” underscores the wealth of discoveries offered by Heritage Online, a digital database and screening room collating details of classic film catalogs from all over the world, facilitating the work of buyers, especially VOD platforms in search of rights holders to heritage titles.Heritage Online fully launches on Saturday with the