An 8-year-old boy disappears while playing in the woods during a camping trip with his family. Fifteen years later, the child has not been found, but his mother and brother are convinced — or trying to convince themselves — that he was abducted by aliens.
Against all odds, we end up believing in this improbable scenario in the series Separate company, which premieres Thursday, June 6 on Club illico. Author and director Benoit Lach knows how to draw us into his paranormal story. He takes the spectators by the hand and quietly leads them to be moved by the extraordinary adventures of the characters.
The flying saucers and the little green men don’t arrive with a bang in the first episode. Aliens are more subtle than that, though. We can guess their presence. We think we can guess it. We doubt. We even wonder if some of them would not, by chance, have the ability to appear human, the better to invade the Earth and take control of the universe.
Then, we change our minds: we are convinced that the mother (Maude Guérin) and the son (Antoine Pilon) are hallucinating with their stories of extraterrestrials. They are suspected of having gone a little crazy because of the unbearable pain of having lost little Gabriel.
“Ufology, extraterrestrials, it remains a taboo subject, and that’s a bit of what is exploited in the scriptwriting,” says Benoit Lach during a virtual meeting with journalists.
“It’s a series where we are constantly in doubt. We ask ourselves: is it true, is it not true? Sometimes, we move a little towards the truth, and sometimes, we say to ourselves: “Well no, it’s impossible.” It’s a bit like the relationship we have with extraterrestrials: we don’t have it, the damned proof that it exists,” adds the author and director.
Humans first
Without revealing any state secrets, we can say, after watching the first three episodes, that we should expect the presence of paranormal forces. But don’t expect an explosion of special effects against a backdrop of laser beam battles. The point of the series is elsewhere. We witness the dismay of a mother and her eldest son who have lost track of the youngest in the family.
The performers Maude Guérin, Antoine Pilon, Robert Naylor and Juliette Gosselin (as well as the entire cast) accurately embody the protagonists. “Each character has well-kept secrets,” reveals Maude Guérin. She loved playing Micheline, the mother traumatized by the disappearance of her youngest, who transposes all her “babies” onto her eldest son.
Science fiction series evoking beings from other galaxies are not common in Quebec. But Separate company is first and foremost a family drama: “The important thing is to have characters who live stories that touch us,” explains producer Olivier Aghaby.
Faced with the tsunami of series and broadcast platforms to which spectators have access, “we need stories like that, which go beyond the box, out of the ordinary, and which make us dream a little. We need fiction that goes further than ‘pass me the butter’,” he adds.
Stardust
The title Separate company refers to Quebec, its language and its unique culture in North America. But it is possible that humanity will one day become this society “distinct from the rest of the universe”, explains Benoit Lach.
The author has conducted extensive research on ufologists who track unidentified flying objects and their occupants. The Disclosure project, founded in 1993 by the American Steven M. Greer, thus highlighted the efforts made by the Pentagon to identify possible visitors from space.
As a child, Benoit Lach himself experienced an episode similar to the one that inspired Separate company : his brother “disappeared” one afternoon, when a man had recruited young people from the neighborhood to deliver circulars. Alerted, parents brought the children home. The director remembers the anxiety that gripped the family before his brother’s return.
Extraterrestrials had nothing to do with this disappearance, but Benoit Lach “certainly” believes in the presence of life outside our galaxy. “There are not enough grains of sand on Earth to represent all the stars in the universe. We are stardust. We all come from the same place. »
Humanity will undoubtedly one day have proof of extraterrestrial life, he emphasizes. Until then, humans can fall back on television series.