Possibles Média | Early Winter - Présentation

SYNOPSIS

David, a man in his forties, lives a predictable life with his wife Maya and their two children. To please his wife with the latest gadgets, he works solitary shift work, days and nights, as a janitor in a retirement home. But when he begins to suspect that Maya is having an affair, he starts to lose ground, his past threatening to smash everything in his path.

Festivals

- Venice Days Award, Venice Days 2015
- Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2015
- Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia 2015
- Melbourne International Film Festival 2015
- Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2016

Word of the director

I think that Western society is stuck in a kind of prolonged adolescence in so many senses, and I think that one of the main carrots that hangs in front of people everywhere is love in the sense of "falling and being in love". This kind of altered, psychological, chemical brain state, which is a kind of drug. It's an amazing thing, it's really great, but the nuts and bolts of everyday living under one roof together for 15-20 years is much less glamorous, much more tiring, and I think it's a struggle that is not so much explored in cinema because there's a strong streak of escapism in commercial cinema.

At the end of the day, happiness and living well don't have a lot to do with circumstances, but rather with knowing how to be happy and how to interact with the people around you. I think we often get trapped in these emotional cycles... These are issues I try to explore in Early Winter.

It was the first time I worked with a non-Mexican crew and non-Mexican actors, and everybody was quite freaked out by the long take, the style of the film. We finished the first take, and I said: 'Alright, we've got it. Let's move on.' And there was a silence for, like, four seconds. Everybody looked at each other and somebody said: 'You're not going to do coverage?' I said no, and there was another silence. And then someone said: 'Okaaaaay. Whoa.'

I really like working with actors. I believe that you can tell the story through good acting. I kind of go in a little bit naked in that sense. I don't generally use music. I don't do internal cuts within a scene - that lets me focus on the actors, it lets them do their work and allows me do the kind of work I want to do. Of course, it's risky; it comes with its share of challenges for editing. Sometimes you don't get all the incredible things happening in the same take. But I think really good acting can get you a lot in terms of emotional results, and if something is well written and well-acted, you can get anything. It gives you enormous freedom to do things that way. As a scriptwriter and director, it's so wonderful and enriching to build a narrative together with two people who have also been building and structuring characters for 20 years, and are experts at it. The whole idea of coming onto a set with a prescriptive script and telling the actor : 'walk this way, turn around, scratch your head.' I have no idea why anyone would want to do that.

What really interests me in the world is the complexities of human interaction and human relationships. When I started to think about writing a story with Canadian characters, I spoke with some good friends of mine in Canada about winter and the emotional effects of being closed up. I think the seasons have a very strong effect on a relationship, so I was interested in exploring a relationship breakdown or crisis, as it's intensified by the isolation that winter brings on. And also, my own themes, which I always explore: Immigration and the isolation of characters out of their context, trying to emotionally survive in environments that aren't their own. So it was a combination of those two things.