That Kind Of Summer

The Tallahassee Film Festival is proud to present the work of one of North America’s most original and daringly creative filmmakers, Montreal’s Denis Côté. The writer-director slips fluidly between genres, with both documentary (A Skin So Soft, Bestiaire) and fictional features (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, Curling) lighting up a prolific career full of Berlin and Locarno film festival prize-winners. That Kind of Summer, his 15th feature in nearly as many years, shares with the others an inquisitive and unflinching approach to human (and/or animal) nature, and the processes and accidents by which the elements of self (the good, the bad and the ugly) are exposed, and engage a kind of chemical reaction. In Summer, three women (played by a remarkable trio of actresses: Larissa Corriveau, Laure Giappiconi and Aude Mathieu) enter a one-month program at a country retreat for sex addiction where they exorcise their demons and recount past traumas. “Sometimes at a discreet distance, at others transgressively close, the camera swirls around the protagonists in this dance of trauma and lust. Norms are deconstructed, the present becomes tangible and the future conceivable. Cinema is – vibration.” (Berlinale 2022).