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After his revelatory coming-of-age film Genesis, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage has expanded his canvas with Who by Fire, a lush, intimate, and psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with career and romantic jealousies and entanglements. Following its Berlinale and New York Film Festival premieres, KimStim picked up the stellar drama for a release this spring. Ahead of a March 14 opening beginning at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center (with Lesage in person for opening week Q&As) and a March 21 opening at LA’s Laemmle Theatres, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first U.S. trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage. Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film...

Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire begins with a vision of what could be called stasis in motion. Following a car on a highway as it winds its way deeper into the woods, the opening shot holds for an unnervingly long time, accompanied by droning ambient music, before moving into the car, where the legs and hands of two people sitting side by side can be glimpsed. Only later will it be made clear that the occupants of the car are screenwriter Albert (Paul Ahmarani), his two kids, Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) and Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s friend Jeff (Noah Parker), on their way to the cabin of Albert’s former collaborator, Blake (Arieh Worthalter), that’s only accessible by seaplane.

The portentousness of this early journey is laced with a somewhat spiky sense of humor; in one scene, captured in a single long shot, Albert teasingly drives forward several times,...

Liza Weil, Douglas Smith and Noah Parker are set to star in the dark comedy feature Lunar Sway.

Nick Butler is writing and directing the movie that hails from Cloudy Pictures Inc., with development funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. Lucas Meeuse (The Legacy of Cloudy Falls) and Izad Etemadi (Cyrus and Chels) serve as producers, while Robin Cass (Lilies) executive produces.

Lunar Sway centers on Cliff (Parker), who is struggling with his love life in a desert town when he unexpectedly connects with his estranged birth mother (Weil). After learning of his mom’s string of secrets, Cliff is led on a wild misadventure while also spending time with his love interest Stew (Smith), a mysterious dentist.

The film is continuing the casting process and aims to begin shooting in September. Lunar Sway marks Butler’s sophomore directorial feature following The Legacy of Cloudy Falls, which is...

Exclusive: Canadian Filmmaker Mélanie Charbonneau has rolled cameras on her sophomore feature Out Standing, which will shoot on location in Montreal, Quebec, and Hamilton, Ontario, throughout April and May.

The pic stars Nina Kiri ((The Handmaid’s Tale) alongside Vincent Leclerc (The Revenant) and Antoine Pilon (Matthias & Maxime). Rounding out the cast are Adrian Walters (Star Trek: Discovery), Stephen Kalyn (Essex Country), Noah Parker (30 Vies), Anthony Therrien (Falcon Lake), and Nicolas Fontaine (Victoire).

The film follows Officer Sandra Perron, who at the height of a brilliant career with the Armed Forces, resigns unexpectedly. The brass launch an investigation that revs up when a photo circulates of Sandra in uniform tied to a tree apparently unconscious. This was not how the career of the first female officer in the Canadian infantry was supposed to end. Besieged by journalists, struggling to adapt to civilian life, and pursued by the investigation, she denies...

As a general movie rule, when a group of happy weekenders head to a woodland cottage for a bit of rest and relaxation, the great outdoors has some grisly surprises in store for them. In “Who By Fire,” however, the horrors all come from inside the house — or more specifically from the people themselves, many of whose worst impulses and insecurities are unleashed by their tranquil surroundings. Dramatizing a curious case of cabin fever with keen human observation and patient wrangling of intangible dread, the third narrative feature from Quebecois director Philippe Lesage underlines his ability to carve a semblance of a horror movie from everyday domestic drama — confirming him as a filmmaker of considerable grace and daring.

It’s been six years since Lesage’s last film, “Genesis” — a long wait for his admirers, a select club still largely confined to the festival circuit, notwithstanding the polish and rigor of the director’s work.

It’s been almost a decade now that French-Canadian director Philippe Lesage’s intense, intricate dramas have been premiering in top festivals and receiving rave reviews from critics. And yet he unfortunately remains more or less unknown to general arthouse audiences.

Lesage began his career shooting documentaries, including the 2010 hospital chronicle The Heart That Beats, then made his first fictional feature, The Demons, in 2015, following it up in 2018 with Genesis. Both movies were coming-of-age stories — or more like cruel stories of youth, to cite the Nagisa Oshima film — helmed with laser-sharp precision and backed by formidable turns from a young cast. Fine-tuned and freewheeling at the same time, his narratives keep bubbling up until they boil over, in explosive sequences where the characters let it all out or start bellowing pop songs at will.

He’s a gifted and original filmmaker who should be getting more attention — which is why...

You’d expect the pivotal music cue in Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire to be its namesake by Leonard Cohen, a beautiful and plaintive prayer of a song. But instead it’s The B-52s’ infectious slice of bubblegum “Rock Lobster,” initially seeded through a dialogue reference, then heard fully in an eccentric sequence I won’t further detail. The funny, noteworthy quirk of “Rock Lobster,” though, is its structurally well-earned length of just under seven minutes. Who by Fire, running 161 minutes itself, also seems to be up to something, committing to that runtime as such a contained, semi-domestic drama: a provocation through duration.

A rising Québécois filmmaker making his second coproduction with France, Lesage thus far in his career has tinkered around the edges of familiar genres and subject matter, embedding these into his personal sensibility if never quite reinventing them. The camera styles of his two prior...

New films featuring Carey Mulligan, Adam Sandler, Amanda Seyfried, Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough are among 2024 Berlinale Specials lineup, the out-of-competition gala presentations at next year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

Spaceman, a Netflix sci-fi drama from Chernobyl director Johan Renck, starring Sandler, Mulligan, Kunal Nayyar, Isabella Rossellini and Paul Dano, will have its world premiere in the Berlinale Special gala sidebar. Sasquatch Sunset, an adventure comedy from the Zellner brothers which stars Keough, Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner, and Christophe Zajac-Denek, will screen in Berlin after its Sundance debut. Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, which had its world premiere in Toronto, and stars Seyfried alongside Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Ambur Braid, and Michael Kupfer-Radecky, will also have its international premiere in the Berlinale Specials gala section.

Treasure (aka Iron Box), the 90-set English-language feature from German director Julia von Heinz (And Tomorrow The Entire World), which stars Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry...

Stars: Matias Garrido, Corteon Moore, Robyn Alomar, Noah Parker, Dakota Jamal Wellman, Tim Rozon, Mary Walsh, Emma Elle Paterson, Tori Barban | Written by Ian Carpenter, Aaron Martin | Directed by Philippe Gagnon

Released in 1980 the original Terror Train was one of the many slashers to be released in the wake of Friday the 13th and Halloween. Benefiting from the presence of that film’s star, Jamie Lee Curtis it did well at the box office and has built a following over the years. There was even an attempt to remake it in the early 2000s, but that ended up morphing into Train, a film that sucked even by torture porn standards.

Since the original was a favourite of mine, I was initially interested when I heard it had been remade and was scheduled for an October release. However, when I heard Tubi was involved, a lot of that interest faded. As...

The 1980 movie Terror Train avoided the remake treatment during the 2000s, a time when retro slashers were being modernized one after the other. While a remake was in the works at one point, that project eventually evolved into something else. However, the Jamie Lee Curtis “slashic” has finally received an official redo after forty-two years; the most high-profile release in Tubi’s Terror on Tubi event is bringing the doomed party train straight into the 2020s. Yet despite its contemporary lingo, bloodier output and a few story adjustments, Philippe Gagnon’s Terror Train essentially follows the same route as the original.

From start to finish, the remake mirrors Roger Spottiswoode’s Terror Train. The setup is exactly the same as well, though someone might be asking why today’s college students would want to party on a train in the first place. But before the story leaves the station, the...

Filmax series “The Red Band Society,” one of the TV fiction formats with most international adaptations in recent years, is now getting a French-language Canadian version.

Multi-award-winning Quebec producer Encore Television, the company led by François Rozon, Vincent Gagné and Louis Bolduc, will produce in collaboration with Quebecor Content. The series is due to be released on Canadian broadcaster Tva in winter, 2022.

The new remake was negotiated by the Barcelona-based mini-major Filmax’s international sales arm, headed by Iván Díaz, and French distributor Ace Entertainment.

A first Canadian season will be 10 hours long and directed by actor-director Yan England. The script, which will largely stick to the original, will be penned by “Félix, Maude et la fin du monde” writers Michel Brouillette and Stephanie Perreault.

The series also boasts a very strong cast of actors such as Noah Parker (“La déesse des mouches à feu”), Anthony Therrien (“Les faux tatouages...

The 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival is now in the books. The jury, featuring Jeremy Irons, Bérénice Bejo, Bettina Brokemper, Annemarie Jacir, Kenneth Lonergan, Luca Marinelli, and Kleber Mendonça Filho, shared their award winners–and now here’s a look at what we admired the most during the festival.

Featuring a fair bit of cross-over, check out our favorites below and return for more coverage (including reviews and interviews). Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter for updates as these films get distribution and release dates.

Dau. Natasha

It is no use of hyperbole to suggest that Dau. Natasha already looks like one of the most provocative art films ever made. The first strictly theatrical feature to be released from Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s gargantuan, unprecedented Dau project (12 other films were shown at an immersive exhibition in Paris last year), it offers the viewer a kind of...

Die-hard grunge fan (and drug dealer) Fred (Noah Parker) tells Catherine (Kelly Depeault) she can’t play her Hole CD because Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. It’s a remark that was probably half joke and half memorial that leads into Keven (Robin L’Houmeau) dropping the necessary wisdom of knowing Love wouldn’t have been able to stop him if she tried. Cobain wasn’t a victim. He lived hard and walked a road of his own making to an end he ultimately embraced enough to pull the trigger. It’s the same type of lives these Québécois teens lead—mescaline, sex, rock-n-roll, and rage. So when Catherine replies with an “I don’t care” after being confronted about her fast-moving downward spiral, she isn’t being flippant. She truly doesn’t. She’s embraced the risks.

This is the reality many coming-of-age films forget. You need the complexity of...