À L'OUEST DE PLUTON

WEST OF PLUTO

Canada 2008 (35mm, 95', col.)

  27° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL    FESTA MOBILE / FIGURE NEL PAESAGGIO

regia, sceneggiatura, produttori/directors, screenplay, producers
Henry Bernadet, Myriam Verreault
fotografia/cinematography
Patrick Faucher
montaggio/film editing
Myriam Verreault
scenografia/production design
Louis Blackburn, Emily Belanger
musica/music
Aucun
suono/sound
Mathieu Campagna, Pierre Rousseau
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Alexis Drolet (Jérôme), David Bouchard (Pierre- Olivier), Anne-Sophie Tremblay Lamontagne (Kim), Yoann Linteau (Benoît «Paluche»), Sandra Jacques (Émilie Bégin), Micaël Minguy-Bédard (Nicolas), Yann Bernard (Kevin), Marc-Alexandre Paradis (Steve Labbé), Denis Marchand (Gaetan), Thomas Gionet-Lavigne (il fratello di Émilie/ Émilie’s Brother)
produzione/production
Vostok Films
vendita all’estero/world sales
E1 Entertainment International

WEST OF PLUTO
Canada, 2006. Twenty-four hours in the life of a group of adolescents who live in the suburbs of Quebec. Pierre-Olivier is disturbed by the news that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet and is no longer the ninth planet of the solar system; Jérôme wants to announce his feelings to his true love. In the meantime, Nicolas and Steve are trying to come up with a name for their punk rock band and Émilie, who wants to impress her friends, is organizing a party at her home. But nothing seems to be going the way it should.

“For a long time we had thought about making a film about this controversial and fascinating moment in people’s lives. We weren’t interested in using professional, adult actors to talk about the phenomenon of adolescence. Rather, we wanted to look at the world of young people as realistically as possible, both in the way we represent them and in what we have to say. We wanted to film this exciting and cruel period through the eyes of today’s adolescents. Who are they? What do they think about the world they live in?”

Henry Bernadet

Henry Bernadet (Canada) holds a DEC in television production from Cégep de Jonquière and a bachelor’s degree in film production from Concordia University. He won the Vidéaste recherché-e competition, a programme to support emerging francophone filmmakers, with his first film. His video work for the stage play Téléroman by Larry Tremblay earned him a nomination from the Gala des masques. West of Pluto is his first feature film.

FILMOGRAPHY
(Updated to the last partecipation to TFF)
Henry Barnadet, Myriam Verreault:
À l’ouest de Pluton (West of Pluto, 2009).

Myriam Verreault

Myriam Verreault (Canada) holds a bachelor’s degree from Université Laval, where she majored in film studies. She graduated from Cégep de Jonquière with a DEC in media arts and technology. Her first fictional film Comment le Dr Ducharme enfreignit le code d’éthique was awarded at the Vidéaste recherché-e competition in 2003 and won third prize in the young filmmakers’ competition at the Carroussel international du film of Rimouski. She founded and runs Vostok Films, a film production company.

FILMOGRAPHY
(Updated to the last partecipation to TFF)

filmografia essenziale/essential filmography

Myriam Verreault:
Comment le Dr Ducharme enfreignit le code d’éthique (cm, 2003).

Henry Barnadet, Myriam Verreault:
À l’ouest de Pluton (West of Pluto, 2009).

Sunday November 15th, at 16.00, Ambrosio 1
A moveable feast/Figures in the landscape
Meeting Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verrault, directors of À L’ouest de
Pluton

The choice of the actors
Myriam Verrault: We went to do some castings in a high school and we chose ten people out of fifty interviewed. With these ten we began working on improvisation. Then we tried to create a synthesis between the characters of the screenplay and the individual characteristics of the actors.

Pluton vs Paranoid Park    
Henry Bernadet: Parallelisms between our work and Gus Van Sant's one surely exist. We really love his cinema, but this work was shot before Paranoid Park. However our adolescents are different from the ones of Van Sant's movies. His plot is very dramatic and the youth must fight against a tragic reality. Whereas our plots are normal stories from which we tried to pluck something which is not banal at all.

Pluton and the adolescence
M.V.: There is an identification between the planet Pluton, which is no more considered a planet, and the adolescence, which is no more childhood and not yet adulthood. The hurdle that the adolescents must overcome to enter the adulthood is the fact not to want to become a number of the society. So they shut themselves up in their world, cold and distant as Pluton's atmosphere. Therefore we tried to observe their world from a distance, just as must be done with a planet.