JOUTEL

Joutel features Gérard and Jocelyne, an elderly couple who have found neither real inner peace nor concrete meaning in their existence. The discomfort that they feel is expressed with a realism imbued with strangeness. I saw this film as a hybrid between Love by Michael Haneke, through its excerpts from everyday life mixing affection and weariness, and Songs From The Second Floor by Roy Andersson, through its dreamlike sequences. The fantastic intrusions that punctuate the work seek to address, with a poetic gaze, existential questions that arise at the end of life, such as the anticipation of death, legacies, mourning, and regret.

I tried to offer viewers a foray into a reality that they will one day have to face through a work imbued with dreaminess and potent symbolism. Following a series of interviews carried out in several nursing homes for the elderly during the winter of 2018, I was touched by people’s concerns at the end of their life. Dread of death, longing, contradictions in religion, fear of the unknown, and anxiety for the legacy are integral parts of the human experience. That’s why I thought Joutel could be relevant to a broad audience.

By locating part of the story in Joutel itself, a ghost town in the James Bay region of Quebec, I tried to evoke the ghosts of the past who hunt Jocelyne and Gérard. Like two lost individuals in the vastness of the North, the characters search for landmarks and answers as they quietly move towards the end of their lives.