Renegade Breakdown Live
To celebrate Denis Côté receiving the Prix Albert-Tessier (Quebec’s highest honor for a filmmaker) we are presenting a retrospective of his work. From his debut to his latest feature film (his sixteenth), his directorial choices and perspective have remained at the core of his storytelling. Embracing documentary techniques, a cornerstone of Quebec cinema, he explores the truth-bearing power of cinematic images, testing their limits through a masterful mise-en-scène. In the truest sense, he seeks to uncover the unexpected, the improbable, peeling back the layers of a world that is both enigmatic and complex. His filmmaking evokes the essence of cinema’s early days, where the camera casts a unique and unparalleled light on the world we inhabit.
"Far more than your average livestream show, Renegade Breakdown Live is an ultra-stylised, noirish performance film (complete with arthouse-inspired posters). Envisioned as a “laboratory experiment”, the freeform concert was shot and directed by experimental Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté, who captured French-Canadian techno titan Marie Davidson – formerly a solo producer – and her new band L’Œil Nu’s first-ever performance [...]" (Ben Jolley, NME, 2021)
Denis Côté
Denis Côté (1973 – New-Brunswick, Canada) has shot fifteen short-films in the 1990s and 2000s. He has been a journalist and film critic before directing his first feature film Drifting States (Les états nordiques) in 2005, launching a sustained and prolific creative rhythm. Carcasses (2009) was presented at Cannes’ Quinzaine des réalisateurs. Curling, his fifth feature film, won honors at the Locarno Film Festival and was presented at more than 80 festivals. In 2013, Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Vic+Flo ont vu un ours) won the Silver Bear for Innovation at the Berlin International Film Festival. His award-winning films explore themes of solitude and alienation through often eccentric characters. Highlighted in more than forty retrospectives worldwide, his distinctive signature was recognized with the Prix Albert-Tessier in 2024, the highest honor in cinema awarded by the Government of Quebec. Nobody’s Violence (2026) is his 17th feature film.
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Photo: Lou Scamble
Marie Davidson & L’Oeil nu dans l’oeil de Denis Côté
La musique, l’ordre dans lequel sont présentées les chansons de l’album Renegade Breakdown, sert de trame narrative à l’œuvre traversée par quelques moments que Denis Côté qualifie de « microfictions, où l’on quitte la performance pour aller filmer autre chose, une idée [...] jamais vue dans une captation musicale [...] ».
