A recurring presence on the international festival circuit, Canadian director Félix Dufour-Laperrière has made a name for himself at events such as Rotterdam and Annecy, both of which screened his film Archipelago – a self-described animated essay about real and fictional islands – in 2021. His latest work, Death Does Not Exist, debuted in Cannes at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes and is enjoying its own tour in the cinema event world, although its somewhat abstract approach to storytelling may be a hindrance outside of the purely arthouse domain.
At the center of it all is Hélène (Zeneb Blanchet), who abandons her comrades in arms after a botched attack and flees into the forest. There, she runs into Manon (Karelle Tremblay), a double of sorts, who leads her into a mysterious valley where transformation is constant and everything is open to interpretation. For Hélène, it becomes a journey of self-questioning, as she looks back on her past and the dilemmas – moral, political and human – that played an integral part in shaping it.
The plot elements described above may seem at odds with the film’s 72-minute duration, but the premise is actually just an excuse for Dufour-Laperrière to let his visual flights of fancy run wild. Sure, the philosophical dialogue remains a constant, but the director is not really interested in the plot in the strictest sense of the term. Once Hélène runs into Manon, the propulsive momentum of the opening stretch gets out of the way, and the valley where nothing is what it seems takes over.
More than anything, it’s a major showcase for the work of the animators from Miyu Productions, a studio whose versatility has been on display in recent years in movies such as Chicken for Linda! (2023) and fellow Quinzaine alum Ghost Cat Anzu (2024). Here, the style is painterly and surrealist, with a remarkable eye for detail and a penchant for bending our notion of what is actually happening right in front of us. The struggle may be internal for the protagonist, but Dufour-Laperrière’s imagination is very much out in the open for everyone to see.
Of course, this may prove a bit too vague for viewers expecting a more linear evolution of what was laid out in the beginning, while fans of the more visually driven sequences could, on the flipside, object to the heavy-handed soul-searching and class war evoked in the spoken words, of which there are many. The two opposites never fully attract in an entirely satisfactory way, but the mixture is undoubtedly a fascinating one, equal parts infuriating, bewildering and utterly hypnotic.
The title may have predictably philosophical connotations, but in the context of an industry driven into a panic by recent transformations tied to the use of artificial intelligence, it’s also a vibrant celebration of life. And not just any life – the life and liveliness of the human beings who injected every fiber of their being into every single frame, painstakingly crafting a world that, for all its rationality-defying characteristics, looks and feels real. As in, made by hand, not by prompt. In the microcosm that is Miyu Productions, the death of animation does not exist.
Director, Screenwriter: Félix Dufour-Laperrière
Cast: Zeneb Blanchet, Karelle Tremblay, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, Barbara Ulrich, Françoise L., Marie B., Félix Dufour-Laperrière
Producers: Nicolas Dufour-Laperrière, Félix Dufour- Laperrière, Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Pierre Baussaron
Music: Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière
Sound: Olivier Calvert, Samuel Gagnon-Thibaudeau
Production companies: Embuscade Films, Miyu Productions
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (International Competition)
In French
72 minutes
