Invited by his friend Max, Jeff arrives at the estate of renowned director Blake Cadieux. He has high hopes for the trip, as Cadieux is an artist he greatly admires. Joining them is Max’s older sister, Aliocha, whom Jeff secretly has a crush on. However, this short stay turns out to be something entirely different from what anyone expected.

The film premiered at the Berlinale, in the Generation section, where it won the top prize.

Film expert recommends

A new film by an eminent Canadian filmmaker who started out with feature-length documentaries before devoting his attention to the lives of young people in features, a good example being Demons (2015), where, unlike the ‘teenage’ Who By Fire, the protagonist is a boy just entering adolescence. Lesage is representative of the cinema of Quebec, a Canadian province that is a bit of a state within a state, also in terms of film; from here came such well-known artists as Denys Arcand, Rober Lepage, Léa Pool and Jean-Marc Vallée. Who by Fire is a representative sample of Lesage’s cinema: the unpredictable plot, the large role of dialogue, the clash and intermingling of youth and adulthood, which can be very toxic, the constant search for answers to existential problems, the conflicts of reason with corporeality. There are also ingredients that make a screening of Who by Fire a unique experience: the screening time (160 minutes!), the multi-genre soundtrack (from B -52’s to classical music), the seamless transition from indoor scenes to those set in the North American wilderness, and finally, the balancing act between drama, comedy and irony. An uncommon work, worthy of discovery far more than a multiplex playlist.