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Filmmaker Monia Chokri loves a zoom lens. Such is the fun aesthetic of her third feature The Nature of Love. Often the image jumps forwards or backwards, accenting an emotional moment with a punchy, visual exclamation point. It shouldn’t work, yet it does. The film stars Magalie Lépine Blondeau as Sophia, a 40-year-old professor in a comfortable marriage to Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume). “Not unhappy,” she describes herself at one point. Early on, Sophia is intrigued and quickly entranced by Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the craftsperson renovating Sophia and Xavier’s country home. The affair is immediately sexy, exciting, and passionate.

Cinematographer André Turpin’s camera matches the excitement. When things are turbulent––be they good or bad––the camera gets a bit impatient. When things are stale, the camera gets a bit complacent. Consider one of the best moments of the film: Sylvain’s seductive introduction. The camera runs slowly down a corridor,...

The task of crafting an intellectual definition of love — a feeling so indescribable and transcendent that empires have crumbled and countless lives have blown up just because humans craved a little more of it — is, by definition, an impossible task. It’s a feeling that inspires so much art because it can’t be explained or rationalized away. At its best, it’s so overpowering that even the smartest among us have no choice but to suspend their need to analyze and accept that they’ve fallen prey to an emotion better summarized by a three-minute pop song than anything in a textbook.

But the impossibility of the assignment hasn’t stopped the great thinkers of every generation from trying. From ancient Greek philosophers who argued that love couldn’t be separated from unfulfilled sexual desire and obsession to more modern interpretations that see it as a state of being...

Gory Hindi action film Kill opens on 827 screens via Roadside Attractions this weekend. It’s the distributor’s first foray into Indian film, which is having another moment after two pics hit the top 10 in North America last week. This is a crowded theatrical market with wide releases piling in and some high-profile indie holdovers. New indie debuts include Mother Couch and The Nature of Love in NYC.

Kill isn’t traditional Bollywood, shorter at an hour forty five minutes and without song and dance numbers in between the action. It debuted at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section, also screening at Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest and last month at Tribeca.

The R-rated film is being marketed to the reliable Indian diaspora — Roadside marketed the film heavily at the Cricket T20 World Cup held in the U.S. for first time in June, and won by India — but...

In a creative output that saw her add a harvest of three feature films in the last five years, after 2019’s A Brother’s Love and 2022’a Babysitter we now find Monia Chokri celebrating lightning in a bottle attraction, longing, and what it looks like when we rationalize surrendering to our emotions and abandoning our safeguards. Her third oeuvre Simple comme Sylvain (aka The Nature of Love) has ties to her astounding debut short Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire (2013) where actress Magalie Lépine-Blondeau began as perhaps Chokri’s creative muse. Sporting autumn browns and on one occasion wearing dish gloves, here Lépine-Blondeau steps into the character of Sophia, a 40-year-old philosophy professor who finds herself well beyond the seven-year itch, as her world is thrown into chaos, leaving her to ponder, “should I stay or should I go?”…...

Monia Chokri’s 2023 film The Nature of Love offers insight into humanity’s most complex emotion. Set in Montreal, it centers on Sophia, a university philosophy teacher played brilliantly by Magalie Lépine-Blondeau. For a decade, she’s been with her partner, Xavier, but their relationship has lost its spark. This changes when rugged contractor Sylvain, portrayed with charm by Pierre-Yves Cardinal, is hired to renovate Sophia’s country home. Their connection is electric, sweeping Sophia into a passionate affair behind Xavier’s back.

As a philosophy professor, Sophia is well-versed in the theories of love put forth by great thinkers. Yet finding herself irresistibly drawn to Sylvain exposes how imperfectly her intellect aligns with her heart. Chokri explores how even the most well-read among us can struggle to understand love in practice.

She depicts Sophia swept up in irrational desire, grappling with conflicting emotions as passion for Sylvain collides with loyalty to Xavier.

A middle-aged woman’s has a giddy fling in Monia Chokri’s latest film – at first all is roses, but then moral murkiness creeps in

Middle-aged women enjoying torrid flings were treated with solemnity in Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade and Harry Wootliff’s True Things. The Québécois actor-director Monia Chokri takes a gentler, livelier tack in her third movie and first as solo screenwriter. It kicks off at a choppily edited dinner-party where a gaggle of erudite pals are bantering about the end of the world (“We’re in extinction denial”), then narrows the focus to one couple. Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), a philosophy professor whose lectures amount to little more than listing quotes about love from the likes of Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Plato, is a decade into her cosy, unchallenging relationship with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume). Hiring the rugged labourer Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) to spruce up her holiday chalet,...

The premise of writer-director Monia Chokri’s Quebec-set The Nature of Love makes it sound like your standard-issue rom-com. Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau), a university philosophy teacher stuck in a static relationship with Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), is one day suddenly swept off her feet by Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the hunky, charming contractor tasked with renovating Sophia and Xavier’s lakeside getaway.

But after scenes depicting Sophia lecturing her classes about history’s great thinkers and their philosophies of love, it becomes clear that Chokri isn’t so much interested in the central couple’s meet-cute as she is in all that the affair triggers for Sophia. And much like what Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven did with the aesthetic of the Sirkian Hollywood melodrama, The Nature of Love engages with the stylings and bubbly tonality of the classic rom-com in ironic fashion, along the way exploring complex aspects of human behavior.

"I'm too romantic. Love should be simple." Music Box Films has revealed an official US trailer for an indie romantic comedy called The Nature of Love from Quebec. This French-language Canadian comedy first premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival last year, and is just now getting a summer debut in limited US theaters. The original title is Simple comme Sylvain in French, or Simple as Sylvain, referring to the man she falls for in this film. Sophia's life is turned upside down when she meets Sylvain. She's from a wealthy family, while Sylvain comes from a large family of manual workers. Sophia questions her own values after abandoning herself to her great romantic impulses – she enjoys sleeping with Sylvain much more following 10 years of marriage and can't stop. So what comes next for her? Starring Magalie Lépine-Blondeau as Sophia and Pierre-Yves Cardinal as Sylvain, plus Monia Chokri, Francis-William Rhéaume,...

“The Nature of Love,” Monia Chokri’s sexy romantic comedy that beat Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” in the best foreign-language film race at this year’s Cesar Awards, has been acquired by Music Box Films for the U.S.

“The Nature of Love” world premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard to strong reviews, followed by a North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Chokri’s film stars Magalie Lépine-Blondeau and Pierre-Yves Cardinal. Music Box Films will open “The Nature of Love” in theaters this summer with a home entertainment release to follow. The film is produced by Metafilms and co-produced by Mk Productions.

“The Nature of Love” follows 40-year-old philosophy professor Sophia, who abandons her stable and conventional marriage for a passionate affair with Sylvian, a craftsman renovating her country house. Their romantic impulses are complicated by intellectual and social differences.

“Monia Chokri takes a familiar romantic comedy...

Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love” has been acquired for U.K. and Ireland distribution by Vertigo Releasing.

The film stars Magalie Lépine Blondeau and Pierre-Yves Cardinal. In the film, the cosy married life of lecturer and intellectual Sophia (Blondeau) takes a bold new turn when she meets Sylvain (Cardinal), the ruggedly charming handyman at her new chalet and she embarks on a steamy and all-consuming affair.

“The Nature of Love” premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand earlier this year and since then has played Toronto and Zurich among other festivals. It has its U.K. premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 13 and will play Chicago post that.

“Female mid-life crises are not explored in this mode of storytelling as often their male counterpart: While the tragedy of the woman who f—s around and finds out is a mainstay of plenty of great literature and cinema,...

Canadian director Monia Chokri isn’t big on Hollywood romance movies that glorify unavailable men who eventually become the prize of women chasing them.

“It’s been done, so I don’t need to do another Pretty Woman,” she dismissively tells The Hollywood Reporter about The Nature of Love, a French-language film about two people from different classes falling in love at first sight, that has been screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Horizons section after its world premiere in Cannes.

For Chokri, romance is a surrogate for female expression as her tragicomedy tackles how women view themselves sexually and behave among men. “It’s about what she feels in her mind,” the director says of Sophia, a 40-year-old Montreal philosophy professor played by Magalie Lépine-Blondeau.

Sophia is in a stable, yet sex-less relationship with her partner Xavier (Francis William Rheaume), but finds her sexual desire is reawakened,...

The rom-com has always appeared to be in safe hands with French-language cinema, but Quebecois director Monia Chokri wanted to push the boundaries of the genre even further with her new film “Simple comme Sylvain.”

“French people like to talk about love but they always do it in the same way of toxic relationships. And there aren’t so many [rom-coms] made by women,” says Chokri, who was last in Cannes in 2019 with her debut feature, “A Brother’s Love,” which won Un Certain Regard’s Jury Cup de Coeur.

“Simple comme Sylvain” centers on a posh French-Canadian woman in a sexless marriage who turns her life upside down when she has an affair with her contractor.

The Quebec-born actor broke out in meaty roles in Canadian auteur Denys Arcand’s “The Age of Darkness” and Xavier Dolan’s “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways.” She also acts in “Simple comme Sylvain,” playing her protagonist’s outspoken best friend,...

Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love” opens by introducing us to 40-year-old philosophy professor Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) and her husband Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume), as they enjoy a dinner party with friends. Said friends (one of whom is played by the director) are similarly middle-class progressive types with nice homes and comfortable lives; Sophia’s job in particular allows a strand of metatextual self-commentary in an otherwise predominantly broad and sexy comedy. It is, of course, a cast-iron rule of cinema that if a film opens with a middle-class dinner party, you’re about to see somebody’s bourgeois certainties undermined, and Chokri doesn’t disappoint.

On the drive home, Sophia and Xavier gossip about their friends’ love lives. Supposedly one of the other couples has sex three or four times a week, but also fights constantly. Xavier is of the opinion that a peaceful but sexless life is preferable,...

In Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love” (“Simple comme Sylvain”), a posh French-Canadian woman in a sexless marriage turns her life upside down for an affair with her contractor.

The film, which is being shopped to buyers in Cannes by Mk2 Films, will world premiere in Un Certain Regard on May 18.

Magalie Lépine-Blondeau delivers a powerhouse performance as Sofia, a 40-year-old philosophy professor in a stable yet stifling relationship with long-term partner Xavier.

When they buy a chalet to refurbish, she meets the strapping, jovial Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who arrives one day to provide a quote for the renovations. The pair jump headlong into a steamy relationship, but as their romance wears on, Sofia realizes that their backgrounds and interests make them far more different than she first thought.

Chokri previously directed “My Brother’s Wife,” which won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard in 2019. Chokri, who directs and wrote the screenplay,...

Simple comme Sylvain

A film that was put into development shortly after she premiered 2019’s La femme de mon frère at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Monia Chokri received some backing Sodec and Telefilm coin for her third film while she was in the midst of preparing her sophomore feature in 2022’s Babysitter (Sundance – Midnight section seelction). Production on Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain took place last October just north of Montreal. Produced by Metafilms’ Sylvain Corbeil and Nancy Grant, this is more or less a tale about the seven year itch which involves Magalie Lépine Blondeau and Pierre-Yves Cardinal.…...

Willie Nelson in a scene from ‘Willie Nelson and Family’ (Photo Courtesy of Sundance Institute)

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival’s lineup will include 64 Short Films and four Indie Episodic projects. More than 10,000 short film submissions were received, and the 64 selected represent work from 23 countries. 519 Indie Episodic submissions were submitted and the four selected represent five countries.

The 2023 Festival will take place in person from January 19–29. Select films will be available online beginning January 24th.

“Short films and episodic projects are an integral aspect of the overall mission of the Sundance Institute — to empower artists who are taking risks, bringing new perspectives to the forefront, and creating work that entertains and provokes conversation,” stated Kim Yutani, Sundance Film Festival Director of Programming. “These platforms provide artists with the ability to expand beyond the boundaries of traditional cinema, while also motivating a unique creativity through an ever expanding format.”

Indie Episodic

Chanshi...

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival officially announced the Shorts and Indie Episodic programs.

Notable artists and talent in the shorts program include Paul Feig, Angela Sarafyan, Kate Flannery, Yalitza Aparicio Martinez, Angela Trimbur, Ken Marino, Bi Gan, and Shannon Plumb. Selections range from more than 23 countries, including Iran and Ukraine.

The Sundance Institute will offer in-person premieres for the Indie Episodic works, with Shorts screened in curated programs. Beginning January 24, all Indie Episodic projects and selected Shorts will also be available to stream online through the end of the festival. The 2023 festival will take place January 19 through 29, 2023, in person in Park City, Salt Lake City, and the Sundance Resort, along with a selection of films available online across the country January 24–29.

This upcoming year’s Short Film program includes work from 23 countries, and the Indie Episodic represents works from five countries. Forty-six percent of the filmmakers identify as women, and filmmakers...

The Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday revealed its 2023 lineup of episodic projects and 64 shorts, the latter culled from the fest’s highest number of submissions at 10,981.

The shorts span 23 countries, including projects from Iran (Azheh) and Ukraine (Liturgy of anti-tank obstacles), with works from such artists as Paul Feig (Help Me Understand producer), Westworld actress Angela Sarafyan (Power Signal), The Office‘s Kate Flannery (Help Me Understand), Roma‘s Yalitza Aparicio Martinez (Sweatshop Girl), The Feels’ Angela Trimbur (Mirror Party), Party Down‘s Ken Marino (Help Me Understand), Bi Gan (director of Cannes Certain Regard title A Long Days Journey Into Night director) and Shannon Plumb (Walk of Shame) to name a few.

Related Story Sundance Film Festival Lineup Set With Ukraine War, Little Richard, Michael J. Fox, Judy Blume Docs; Pics With Anne Hathaway, Emilia Clarke, Jonathan Majors; More Related Story 'The Amazing Maurice' Heads To France,...

Festival also unveils 64 shorts.

Sundance Film Festival organisers have unveiled four Indie Episodic series including the first authorised work exploring the life of American musician Willie Nelson and new work from Xavier Dolan, as well as 64 short films.

Thom Zimny and Oren Moverman directed Willie Nelson And Family for Blackbird Presents and Sight Unseen and the documentary series chronicles the ups and downs of Nelson’s life. The festival will premiere two of five episodes.

The Indie Episodics line-up includes The Night Logan Woke Up from Xavier Dolan, the French Canadian filmmaker behind features like Mommy and I Killed My Mother.

The Night Where Laurier Gaudreault Woke Up (La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est réveillé) is a Canadian miniseries written and directed by Xavier Dolan. It stars Julie LeBreton, Xavier Dolan and Patrick Hivon.

Synopsis

One night in October 1991, the fate of Mimi, her brother Jules and their friend Logan is forever changed by a terrible incident which leads to their separation. Many years later, following her mother’s death, Mimi returns to her hometown and meets Jules for the first time since then. That is when they both realize that nothing can ever be the same.

The Night Where Laurier Gaudreault Woke Up (2022-) Director

Xavier Dolan

Cast

Julie Le Breton / Mireille Larouche

Xavier Dolan / Elliot Larouche

Patrick Hivon / Julien Larouche

Éric Bruneau / Denis Larouche

Magalie Lépine-Blondeau / Chantal Gladu

Julianne Côté / Stéfanie

Jasmine Lemée / Mireille (14 years old)

Elijah Patrice-Baudelot / Julien (16 years old)

See full credits >>...

"Time helps and heals our mistakes." Club illico in Quebec has debuted the first official trailer for a series titled The Night Where Laurier Gaudreault Woke Up, also known as The Night Logan Woke Up. If you've been wondering when we'll see the next, new film from the acclaimed Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan - this is his latest project. But it's a series, not a new film this time, which is what so many directors are doing right now in these strange times for the film industry. This one follows the story of three friends whose lives are shattered after one commits rape. One October night in 1991, the destinies of Mireille, her brother Julien and their best friend Laurier are forever changed by a terrible incident and their paths go their separate ways. Both families are broken. Nothing will ever be the same again… This stars Patrick Hivon, Magalie Lépine Blondeau,...

Coming off the still-fresh release of her sophomore film in Babysitter (it was a Sundance world preem albeit virtual edition), production has already begun on Monia Chokri‘s third feature, Simple Comme Sylvain. Thanks to the socials we learn that Magalie Lépine Blondeau (the actress who toplined Chokri’s brilliant 2013 short Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire) once again reteam with the director. A project that was mentioned as early as 2019 and benefitted from some Sodec and Telefilm coin is being produced by Metafilms’ Sylvain Corbeil and Nancy Grant. Production is taking place just outside of Montreal. Xavier Dolan’s regular Dp André Turpin is the cinematographer here.…...

Maddie Dyer and Rachel Griffiths.

After bonding on Ride Like a Girl, Rachel Griffiths and emerging writer-director Madeleine Dyer are jointly developing a TV comedy series based on a prominent Australian actor.

Describing Rachel’s concept as a new age, male version of Eliza Dolittle, Dyer says the plot will follow the actor as he learns to be ‘woke’ in how he relates to women and conducts himself in the current social climate.

They envisage an Extras-style series where actors and celebrities will play versions of themselves and are still in discussions with the actor about his participation.

Dyer spent five months with Griffiths on a Screen Australia-funded director’s attachment and director’s assistant on pre-production and principle shoot of the Michelle Payne biopic starring Teresa Palmer and Sam Neill.

That collaboration prompted Griffiths to laud Dyer as a “sister zeitgeist hunter” during her Hector Crawford memorial lecture at Screen Forever.

Writer-director Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways begins in 1989, two years into Fred (Suzanne Clément) and Laurence's (Melvil Poupaud) relationship. Everything seems hunky dory, until Laurence drops a bomb on Fred -- he wants to become a woman, but he wants to continue his romantic relationship with Fred. Just because he wants to be a woman does not mean that he loves Fred any less. The problem is that Fred is attracted to men, not women. As if dipping his toes into the pool of womanhood, Laurence begins to dress like a woman and wear makeup. As a result he is fired from his job, gets in barroom brawls and loses Fred. Laurence's transition from male to female is a long and difficult one. As we jump forward through the years, we find Laurence in a relationship with Charlotte (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) and Fred is married with a child. Nonetheless, everyone in...