Providence

My ambition is to write and shoot a period piece in a modern way. Although the film is transposed to Quebec, its context is similar to Hawthorne’s puritan New England: the plot has to take place within a community whose survival, they think, depends on how strongly united they are around their God. A God who sees everything. And I want to explore what it feels like to try and be your own self while under constant scrutiny. Providence is the very image of an appalling moral conformism that verges onto mass hysteria. Providence is a dystopia - a utopia that eventually brings alienation and despair instead of happiness. Providence stands somewhere between Carpenter’s Village of the Damned and Haneke’s small town in The White Ribbon. Yet the film’s aesthetics will be much more similar to those of a shadowy fantastic tale than to any lavish historical drama where people speak like books. My characters speak like you and me. And their motivations can be shared by anyone: shame, hate, the fear of losing one’s child... Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is not the redemption parable it has been said to be. It shows how Hester becomes aware of the prison she has been living in. Now her awareness is a consequence of her banishment; by estranging her, her persecutors unwillingly allow her to free herself. An irony I find most inspiring and hopeful.