(BERLIN) Upstairs at the Berlinale Palast, Marlene-Dietrich Square, in front of the entrance to the large gala hall, you cannot miss the life-size photographs that the distinguished guests autograph each day on a rotating basis. Monday, it was Isabelle Huppert. Tuesday, it was Martin Scorsese. On Wednesday, Denis Côté in turn scratched his portrait, which has hung on the wall among those of all the members of the juries since the start of the 74e Berlinale.
There is no Quebec filmmaker more associated with the Berlin Festival than Denis Côté. He’s a subscriber. He has presented seven of his films there since Bestiary in 2012, including four in official competition. He was there again last year with A summer like that. In 2013, he won the Silver Bear for Innovation for Vic+Flo saw a bear and in 2021, for Social hygienethe Best Director Award in the Encounters section.
This year, he is part of the jury for this section dedicated to so-called more daring forms of cinema. And he doesn’t seem to find the task easy, even if the other jurors are filmmakers he knows and appreciates. “We wonder how to proceed with the deliberations,” he said. Do we each offer our personal achievements? Do we come up with five films that deserve to be part of the discussion? »
You wouldn’t guess it from listening to his juror’s anxieties, but Denis Côté is in Berlin like a fish to water. He seems embarrassed that I pointed it out to him, but he is here in “his” festival. “It’s an honor to be there, that’s for sure,” he confides to me between two screenings, in the café of the Potsdamer Platz hotel where all the jurors are staying. But I’m so not the type to speak with my feelings and my heart that in the same sentence, I feel obliged to tell you that Carlo [Chatrian, le directeur artistique sortant de la Berlinale] made a friend. »
He is not in Berlin just because he has influential friends. He is one of the authors who count in world cinema. His films have been presented in around forty retrospectives across the planet. There will be a new one in the fall in Colombia. The Criterion Channel platform – digital Ali Baba’s cave for film buffs – recently highlighted some of his works.
In Berlin, people are fighting for it. I met him at two cocktail parties and stood in line with him before an official screening at the Berlinale Palast. Every five minutes on average, someone came to tap him on the shoulder to greet him. A filmmaker or actress, festival director or programmer, from Europe, Asia, South America, Canada or the United States. Barrabas in the Passion (not Hamaguchi’s film nor Scorsese’s).
On the international festival circuit, this former critic, darling of Cinema notebookshas probably been the most sought-after Quebec filmmaker for 15 years. Miss Kenopsia, his most recent film, has just been invited to South Korea. The paradox is that his works are generally seen in Quebec by fewer than 5,000 people. “This is the nicest room I’m going to have.” It’s happening tonight! » he declared in front of an enthusiastic young audience, during the premiere of this fascinating cinematographic essay last fall, as part of the Montreal International Documentary Meetings.
I met him a few weeks earlier in Rouyn, at the opening banquet of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue International Cinema Festival, and he was less in demand there than in Berlin. However, he is one of the greatest ambassadors of our seventh art. I remember that during a visit to a video store in Paris a few years ago, there were only three filmmakers in the Quebec section: Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan and Denis Côté.
In 2009, all three were selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Side for CarcassesVilleneuve for Polytechnic and Dolan for I killed my mother. They competed alongside Hong Sang-soo, Michel Franco, the Safdie brothers, Naomi Kawase, Alain Guiraudie, Riad Sattouf, Pedro Costa, Hippolyte Girardot, Sebastian Lelio, the late Lynn Shelton and none other than Francis Ford Coppola.
All 15 of Denis Côté’s feature films have been released at category A festivals. Only two of them have not won a prize at a festival. The winner of the Best Director Award at the Locarno Festival for Curling, in 2010, is part of a chapel, that of the left field of world cinema. He is aware of it and almost apologizes for it.
“I think I took advantage of the old idea of the politics of the authors of the Notebooks. We discover an author, we’re there for his next film, and then if we love him, we don’t let him go. We follow a signature. I’m not complaining! I’ve been making a living making cutting-edge films for 20 years. I’m not saying it’s luck, but it’s a luxury. »
His connection is so close with film festivals that the co-founder of the Quebec City Cinema Festival, Olivier Bilodeau, offered to donate a kidney to him. Côté had suffered from kidney failure for 17 years. The transplant took place last summer. “It’s a beautiful miracle, the transplant. Every day that passes, I think of Olivier and I still try to find how I can thank him. »
He says he found an energy that he hadn’t had for a while. But he feared the worst when flu-like symptoms appeared last weekend among various jurors. One of them even had to be hospitalized. “I’m still a little fragile. My immune system is weak, but I go to parties and I can do things that I couldn’t have done in the last five years. »
The filmmaker remains as prolific – he has four projects more or less in the works – but he does not intend to return to the frenetic pace of the festival circuit that he experienced before. “I had to take a forced 18-month break,” says Côté, who recently turned 50. Illness and age have made me think about the rhythm of festivals. Although of course it’s always nice when a young person approaches me in the street, abroad, to tell me that they like my cinema. »
Accommodation costs were paid by the Berlinale and Telefilm Canada.