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) founded nihilproductions in the 1990’s and shot about 15 short films. He was a journalist and film critic before directing his first feature film Les états nordiques in 2005, beginning a sustained collaboration with producer Stéphanie Morissette that continued with Nos vies privées in 2007, and then Curling, his fifth feature film, which won top honors at the Locarno Film Festival and was shown in over 70 festivals. His films have been shown in dozens of cinematic events. His first feature film under the umbrella of La maison de prod, Vic+Flo ont vu un ours, won the Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer Prize) at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival.
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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 [...] ».
