Canadian auteur Denis Côté received a new kidney from a donor friend in August 2023, after a degenerative disease had threatened both his life and his ability to keep making movies.  

“I didn’t know if I’d receive a transplant or dialysis, or if I’d die. I had no clue what was life on the other side or whatever was upcoming,” Côté tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the world premiere of his 17th film, Nobody’s Violence, at the Locarno Film Festival. He wrote the script for the drama — about a young woman who makes a death pact to help desperate people end their lives — during the final year of his illness, when his kidney function had dropped critically low.

The result is the film’s lead character, Mira, played by Larissa Corriveau: a solitary woman of few words who let Côté explore what it means to live under a death threat while still holding onto hope and the possibility of changing others’ lives. Côté has worked with Corriveau on five earlier films he wrote and directed, including another Locarno title, Mademoiselle Kenopsia, which he shot in September 2022 while battling the same progressive kidney disease.

Nobody’s Violence, which is being shopped to international buyers by Heretic Films, also stars veteran French actor Philippe Rebbot as Ludo, and Xavier Bergeron as Pierric, a young man Mira meets during her travels.  

Côté has premiered seven previous feature films at Locarno, and as he prepares to launch Nobody’s Violence on the festival circuit, he spoke with THR about debuting a death-pact drama now that his health — and his capacity to keep making films — has been restored.

Your movie deals with the controversial issue of assisted death. How did you approach the script for Nobody’s Violence, given complex medical, ethical, legal and emotional questions that surround the issue?

I didn’t feel like tackling or dealing with an issue. It’s more personal and subtle than that. The script was written at the worst period of my health condition. I didn’t know if I’d receive a transplant or dialysis, or if I’d die. I had no clue what was life on the other side or what was upcoming. I was in an in-between space, and I was making another film on that subject of liminal spaces at the time: Mademoiselle Kenopsia. The film is not a comment on anything sociological or the fact that we now have MAID in Canada. [In 2016 Canada has passed into law MAID — Medical Aid in Dying — a legal process that allows someone who is found eligible and has given informed consent to receive assistance from a medical practitioner to end their own life.] It’s about an angel woman stuck with twisted improbable job and in a somber moment of her life. And she must consider her own personal or professional afterlife.      

Mira comes face to face with death, yet early on goes about her assistance to the dying is emotionally impassive, matter of fact. Was this deliberate? And why?

Yes. Quickly, with Larissa, we talked about her character being an exterminating angel or an angel of death. She goes on and on, coldly, like the alien character of Scarlet Johannson in Under the Skin. She just knows what she has to do but the film pushes her to become more and more human. She’s slowly being really affected by this job that has been going on for maybe six months, a year or more.  

How important was it to show as you do two sides to the controversial assisted dying issue in your movie, even more so in Catholic Quebec?

Yes, Mira had to meet resistance somewhere. Animism is still present in the daily lives of many. In one particular scene, the character uses very few words to express that assisted suicide is an impossible theory. Even though this medical aid in dying is overall quite well accepted here [in Canada], that resistance could have been coming from a devoted Catholic Quebecois character.   

The character Pierric — a young man Mira meets early in the film who becomes something of a love interest — basically says we’re all going to die, first we party. His words later prove prophetic.

The whole idea of Pierric was fun to write. Mira met him and didn’t forget that her life could be made of a better communion with people and the world. Pierric represents the idea of two things missing in her life: love and sex. But through the improbabilities, playfulness and evilness of the script, I made sure they would meet again.  

Mira, despite all her shyness, responds to Pierric’s aggressive sexual advance. Is she looking for some kind of release?

It’s the first step, for sure. She’s repressed because of the nature of her job, because of a possible dark past we don’t know. But it doesn’t take much for her to come back with the living.

The mysterious group that Mira belongs to is like a cult, led by a louche Ludo, a grim reaper character. What inspired the look and feel of this character and his organization?

They all look like a cult, connected somehow to the government, made up of hedonists and bohemians. I don’t really know who they are. I created them as a force against Mira, as a group you don’t want to be a part of. I imagined them as libertarians, maybe conspiracy theorists, if you let them talk long enough. Meeting Pierric creates an internal shock for Mira. He is life, they are partying around death. To change her life, she will at some point have to destroy something, annihilate something. That’s how I see it. It doesn’t mean that’s how the viewer reacts to all that mess.    

Eventually Mira’s own and Ludo’s lives collide. The camera shows their confrontation at a distance. Why?

There’s a bit of cat and mouse play that I like in the last part of the film. We shot the confrontation in the woods from a distance and also from a very intimate pov. In the editing process, we didn’t feel like overediting that encounter. The emotion was more direct with that colder, distant choice.    

So often in your movie, the camera pans away at the moment someone dies. Why show death at a distance, or not at all?

You don’t see any explicit deaths on screen because that film was created with a strong desire for life, for Mira, for her future. 

Given that France just passed legislation to assist terminally ill adults who meet strict criteria to die, and Italy has some regional laws to allow physician-assisted death, how do you expect your film to be received at Locarno?

If people really want to talk about this issue, I will just talk about our experience in Quebec — we are the country with the highest amount of medical aid in dying in the world. We closed that debate, and other countries are now having it too. I’m glad.    

Can you talk about why you dedicate your 17^th movie to your mother?

Yes, she died of quick complications from Alzheimer’s a year ago. The script was not written at her worst period, but thinking about it now, I wonder if she would’ve been OK with MAID. A person without 100 percent mental capacities can’t request the service. I felt I had to dedicate the film to her, even though it’s made of memories, fragments and traces of my own degeneration from the kidney condition.