Waiting for the Storms
A film by
François Delisle
In the last few years, escalating debates on climate change and its consequences have led to a resurgence of the future in the public realm. We’ve never focused harder on what the world could be like in 2050, 2060 and beyond. Despite all that, how can we explain that nothing is being done to fight climate warming, or nothing worthy of the coming disasters?
So, in a world caught between hegemony and survival, where frivolity overrides needs, where we confuse pleasure with happiness, where we’re all talk and no action, isn’t it time that we imagined something new to help us get back on our feet and avoid losing hope?
While for decades science has been raising the alarm about the state of the planet, I believe that art must make a commitment to provide us with a culture of resistance by building new narratives.
The numbers from scientific studies and weather reports must now be embodied and experienced through the senses. In the current battle that was unleashed by climate change, we can no longer just inform; we have to deliver a gut-punch to viewers.
There’s a difference between knowing and feeling. What you may hear idly or in a moment of distraction can leave you cold. But when you feel something, when it really hits you, it could inevitably turn out to be painful.
That’s what I’m trying to accomplish with Waiting for the Storms: that viewers are carried away by the images and the voices, that they are drawn into the film and ultimately grabbed by the guts. Beyond aesthetic and political considerations, I can help them fix their gaze on what they usually turn away from and, ultimately, provoke and encounter.
With this film, I want to speak to their intelligence, but also to their guts and their fists. In short, I want to provoke, if not shake things up for good.
That is why Waiting for the Storms exists.
Emmanuelle Lussier-Martinez, Mylène Mackay, Victoria Diamond, Dominick Rustam, Robert Naylor, Laurent Lucas, Julian Casey, Rose-Marie Perreault, Masha Bashmakova
DIRECTING: François Delisle
SCREENPLAY: François Delisle
PRODUCTION: François Delisle (Films 53/12)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: François Delisle
SOUND: Simon Gervais, Arial Harrod, Bernard Gariépy Strobl
MUSIC: Robert Marcel Lepage
EDITING: François Delisle
Across various timelines and locations, four characters weave a web of stories that explore human resilience in the face of environmental upheaval.Marie, gripped by obsessive, heart-wrenching questions as a young mother whose child faces a dead-end future, channels her anxiety into passionate activism. Terence, a climate refugee, tells strangers his story in the hopes of finding asylum in the North. McKenzie, a state security officer, breaks the chains of the system to take control of his fate and feel alive at last. Then Kira, a soldier, deserts the army to join a nomadic tribe who are the guardians of humanist values.
Waiting for the Storms is a fable about the climate crisis that transcends artistic boundaries to spark a dialogue between our past, present and future.
A knowout, I'd even say, a masterpiece.
At once ambitious and simple, demanding and accessible, anxiety-inducing yet full of hope.
Waiting for the Storms | 2025
CHSLD | 2020
Cash Nexus | 2019
Chorus | 2015
The Meteor | 2013
Twice a Woman | 2010
You | 2007
Happiness is a Sad Song | 2004
Ruth | 1994
Beebe-Plain | 1991
Knife and Gun | 1990
Who cares about the sea! | 1989
Born in Montreal in 1967, François Delisle began his career by making short films between 1987 and 1991. His first feature, Ruth (1994), had critics raving and made a name for the director in Canada and Europe. In 2003, after founding his production company Films 53/12, he produced his second film, Happiness is a Sad Song (2004), which won several awards and brought him international acclaim. His next two films, You (2007) and Twice a Woman (2010), had a similar reception. The Meteor (2013) and Chorus (2015) screened at the Sundance and Berlin festivals. Both films were major international hits, screening at festivals and theaters in many countries around the world. In 2019 and 2020, Delisle directed Cash Nexus, his seventh feature, and then CHSLD, a documentary short about his mother in her twilight years. For over 30 years, François Delisle has been exploring the human condition through a personal, uncompromising cinema.
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