The list of filmmakers who’ve won Student Academy Awards is a roll call of hitmakers and auteurs: Spike Lee, Robert Zemeckis, Pete Docter, Trey Parker.
This year’s ceremony was held in Toronto and included a Canadian honoree: Sherbrooke, Que., native and Concordia graduate Antoine Boulanger, whose plangent short “The Pichenotte” — about an old woman marked for death who’s unable to shuffle off this mortal coil — won a silver medal in the narrative category, making it eligible for the live-action short category at next year’s Oscars.
“We really have our hearts out there,” said Boulanger at the TIFF Lightbox before the ceremony on Sept. 14. “It can be difficult to get people to see a student film as being at a certain level. They think if it’s made in school, it must not be that great. But I think we did some pretty amazing things.
“The first time I showed it was during a little festival in my hometown,” he continued. “You spend hours, days, weeks, months shooting and editing, and then when people actually see it, it comes alive. It’s like Frankenstein!”
The horror metaphor makes sense insofar as “La Pichenotte” is a dark and morbid comedy: it plays simultaneously as a meditation on mortality and a satire of bureaucracy. Its protagonist is an angel of death who’s more preoccupied by paperwork than the lives he’s charged with taking. He’s flummoxed when his method — the fatal flick of the finger that serves as the film’s title — starts proving ineffective.
“The concept comes from my dad’s suicide attempts,” explained Boulanger, who has spoken about his father’s mental health struggles as a source of inspiration. “I thought about the idea of a character who wants to die but, for some reason, can’t do it. From there, I started to think about the world, and the people in it, and I just let it all happen.
“When you make a movie, the emotion of it, the heart of it, has to be something you know,” he added. “Even if I didn’t live a certain thing, I can relate to it. Once you work through those feelings, you can make sure the story is rich in details, and then it becomes reachable for the audience.”
While Boulanger was reluctant to talk about his work purely in terms of student filmmaking, he credited Concordia’s film program with giving him the tools he needed to succeed.
“(It) gave me the space to explore my own creativity, and to explore the kind of filmmaker that I want to be,” he said. The biggest difference between the filmmaker’s early student shorts and “The Pichenotte” is that the latter is mostly dialogue-driven — a shift that he took as a challenge.
“My other movies were mute,” he said. “It was very intimidating to have to add words. I was working with great actors, well-known actors in Quebec. But we rehearsed a lot. Even though we didn’t have too much time or money, we made sure we knew what we were doing. And we found a new language for this film.”
Boulanger’s advice to aspiring film students was simple: “You need to try to make a movie that speaks to you — that lets you be true to yourself. That’s how it will reach across borders.”
He also had some advice for film schools: “Look for people who don’t fit into any sort of box.”
