Denis Villeneuve can still recall the many conversations he had with international distributors last September when he went to the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals with his latest film, Incendies. 'They were saying to me, we can release the movie after the Academy Awards in February,' he says. 'I was like, 'What the hell are you talking about?' At one point I remember my wife looking at me and saying, 'You look very tired' - and I said, 'They all think I'm going to go [to the Oscars]', but I thought I had no chance!'
Except, of course, he does. When we meet at the De Doelen cultural complex in Rotterdam - where Incendies played to packed theatres and won the UPC Audience Award at the Dutch city's annual international film festival last month - the 43-year-old Quebecois director has just become an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. Incendies is one of the five nominees for this year's best foreign-language film award.
A contemplative, visually stunning film, Incendies is a lyrical treatise about the casualties of war, adapted from a 2005 play by the Lebanese-born playwright Wajdi Mouawad. The film revolves around twins who are probing the life their recently deceased mother Nawal (played by Belgian actor Lubna Azabal) led before she arrived in Canada in the 1980s and reinvented herself as a nondescript secretary in a legal firm.
The siblings, Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simone (Maxim Gaudette), travel to Nawal's homeland - an unnamed Middle Eastern country mired in a civil war between Christian and Muslim militias - to discover the troubles their mother's political beliefs brought her as well as a shocking revelation which makes them re-evaluate their own roots.
'The story was very telling about the world - the way Wajdi thinks we can stop cycles of anger and violence,' says Villeneuve, referring to the twins' quest for reconciliation with the source of their mother's torment. 'I thought it was full of hope and it was such a powerful and beautiful story. A tough one, yes, but there's a lot of light and it's very original - and I was seduced by the way he was trying to tell a very modern Greek tragedy.'
Staying in line with Mouawad's play, Villeneuve veers away from the rights and wrong of geopolitics and zeroes in on how individuals are affected when sucked into the violence engendered by war.