Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was born out of the need to tame my own anxieties about death. Coupled with my ambition to make a vampire movie for several years, the idea of addressing this universally terrifying theme through the vampire figure quickly took hold. As creatures who are doomed to kill to survive, vampires carry death within them. But what happens if they start thinking too much about the value of the lives they take compared to their own? It is by asking this ethical, philosophical and potentially tragicomic question that the character of Sasha, a young humanist vampire ready to let herself die to spare others, was born. Death is also anchored in the character of Paul, a teenager with chronic depressive behaviors who does not find his place in a world he can’t decipher and that is hostile to him. The inner dramas of Sasha and Paul are certainly tragic, but I wanted light and hope to emerge from their encounter. So if the first part of the story addresses their relationship to death, the film is also an ode to life in which a roster of characters, each more colourful than the last, create a whirlwind of adventures for them.

When I begin my creative process, I always give myself the freedom to instinctively draw on several cinematographic genres that live in me or inspire me. I like to have fun with the various codes and languages, I use them as valuable narrative tools to thwart expectations—mine and those of the viewers. This approach also allows me to shape my own universe, which I want to be bold and bountiful, and avoid it getting confined to a single category. Created in this desire for freedom of form and creation, the universe of Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person navigates between genre film, coming-of-age story and dark comedy.

I also approached the directing of this film in a spirit of artistic continuity, as I sought to create an intoxicating cinematic experience that’s always centered around the characters. My visual universe is lush, textured, precise, and my staging and blocking are intimate. The atmosphere is sulphurous, the frame stays poised and the camerawork shows an economy of movements. That way, momentum most often comes from my protagonists. My intention is that the form be put at their service, that it accompany them, sometimes as a way to exacerbate their feeling of suffocation and their disconnect with the world around them, sometimes to offer viewers a window into their past. It’s also in this character-focused mindset that I sprinkled my film with small moments of magic which allowed for a private access into their interiority. Both at the writing and mise-en-scène stages, I paid as much attention to the silences filled with unspoken things, as to moments of tension, colourful dialogues and dynamic sequences where the twists and turns happen. The amalgamation of all these elements was essential to give my film its DNA.

Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux, Noémie O'Farrell, Lilas-Rose Cantin, Arnaud Vachon, Marie Brassard, Madeleine Peloquin, Gabriel-Antoine Roy, Isabella Villalba, Patrick Hivon, Marc Beaupré, Micheline Bernard

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DIRECTING: Ariane Louis-Seize

SCREENPLAY: Ariane Louis-Seize & Christine Doyon

PRODUCTION : Jeanne-Marie Poulain & Line Sander Egede (Art et essai)

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shawn Pavlin

SOUND : Thierry Bourgault D'Amico, Marie-Pierre Grenier, Simon Gervais, Luc Boudrias

MUSIC : Pierre-Philippe Côté (Pilou)

EDITING : Stéphane Lafleur