Sébastien Dostie filme deux antistars : la vieillesse et la mort

Par un après-midi paisible de 2004, alors que sa copine fait une sieste à ses côtés, Sébastien Dostie a l’idée d’un film où l’on voit à l’oeil nu le temps qui passe, le temps qui touche les êtres et qui fait son oeuvre. L’écoutant raconter cette prémisse au réveil, sa copine l’encourage à réaliser le film. Fort d’un appui du CALQ, Sébastien prend congé quelque temps de ses mandats en supervision d’effets spéciaux et réalise Nature Morte, un récit montrant un être humain arrivé – le plus naturellement du monde – à la toute fin de la vie. Le film est un regard sur le passage du seuil de la mort. Programmé à l’intérieur de la section court métrage Québec Gold de Resfest, Nature morte est promis à un long parcours sur le circuit des festivals.

Short films are long on local talent
Mobile Resfest’s three days in Montreal includes 12 films in the Quebec Gold competition

JOHN GRIFFIN, The Gazette
Published: Saturday, November 25, 2006

It has been a long hard slog, but the end of the festival season is now in sight. Since late summer we have seen the coming and going of the World Film Festival, the Festival du nouveau cinema, Cinemania, Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal and no doubt others we’re too battle-weary to remember.
This weekend, the Image et Nation gay and lesbian festival completes its 19th edition. Unless anything else materializes in the next five weeks, that leaves Resfest to wrap up the year.
This is the three-day touring festival’s 10th edition, and it has grown from modest roots in New York to an event that travels to 45 cities on five continents throughout the year, touting the best artists working the frontier of digital technology. The second annual Montreal edition continues at Ex-Centris through tomorrow.
In keeping with its mobile ambitions, Resfest has already morphed to fit this city’s unique cultural profile.
The Canadian version of its glossy catalogue is bilingual where appropriate (Toronto and Vancouver are other stops on the caravan), and multi-talented homeboy DJ Kid Koala makes today his own with an afternoon workshop and an evening show.
But what this column is gradually getting around to is Quebec Gold, a first-ever evening of 12 short films de chez nous in competition tomorrow night for $6,000 worth of cash and technical support.
The evening is the brainchild of short-film cheerleader and Prends ca court founder Danny Lennon and he has roped some serious talent to do the judging. They include Les Bougon writer Francois Avard, directors Stephane Lapointe (La Vie secrete des gens heureux) and Jean-Marc Vallee (C.R.A.Z.Y.), musician and electrovisual whiz DJ Ramachandra Borcar, and the ineffable Anne-Marie Cadieux, a national acting resource. Local communications director Myriam Achard is back in the game after leaving the Montreal International Jazz Festival’s Equipe Spectra in 2005 to reposition her future, and she very kindly shipped along a couple of DVDs for my Resfest edification.
Not surprisingly, much of the material from Quebec Gold was among them. Not surprisingly, much of it was amazing.
Off the top, and without any male bias whatsoever, Catherine De Leon is a huge star in the making. She plays a broken-hearted girl who makes an impromptu stop at her ex’s flat in the Montreal premiere of Alexis Gauthier-Fortier’s erotically charged Apres tout, and she scorches every frame.
Others to watch for include a pair from talented Guillaume Fortin. L’Etranger is a very tight, scary story of mistaken identity; Laura is set around a 16-year-old’s fraught situation in France.
Sebastien Dostie’s affectionate tribute to the passing of all things, Nature Morte, is distinguished by a sure digital hand; while Christian Laurence’s Education nautique would appear to use archaic cinematic devices to frame its story of a boy and the sea. Both are premieres.
Some have seen Denis Cote’s superior hotel chambermaid story Tennessee before, and could see it again. In another vein entirely is The Rip-Off, Kun Chang’s very funny double-look at big-time grifting in a electronics store on the Main.