After his revelatory coming-of-age film Genesis, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage has expanded his canvas with Who by Fire, a lush, intimate, and psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with career and romantic jealousies and entanglements. Following its Berlinale and New York Film Festival premieres, KimStim picked up the stellar drama for a release this spring. Ahead of a March 14 opening beginning at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center (with Lesage in person for opening week Q&As) and a March 21 opening at LA’s Laemmle Theatres, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first U.S. trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter, 2024 César winner for Best Actor for The Goldman Case) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous.”
David Katz said in his Berlinale review, “It’s a truly unrequited, anti-love triangle, and like in his previous work, Lesage sensitively reflects on but never sentimentalizes adolescent behavior: what we observe is raw, tentative, sometimes inexplicable, and put before us as if in a clinical setting, under laboratory conditions and stark lights.”
See the exclusive trailer premiere below and check back for my conversation with Lesage.
