'I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland'

Death Does Not Exist director Félix Dufour-Laperrière is grappling with an existential crisis that many of us looking out in the world today will find relatable. The Quebec filmmaker says he holds onto the "very strong social democratic beliefs" that defined him when he was "young and very intense." But today he's a father of two, and, for the sake of self-preservation, can't be as outspoken about his ideals when looking out at a world that is becoming violently inhospitable to so many different communities.

"I first and foremost, want to protect my kids," says Dufour-Laperrière, on a Zoom call with CBC Arts. "But I wish that they lived in a livable world that is open to all."

This nagging contradiction, or "paradox" as Dufour-Laperrière refers to it, is at the heart of the Archipelago director's latest feature premiering in the Director's Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. The hand-drawn animation, in which colours painted on paper lend rich texture to the lush and often abstract digital landscapes, follows a young activist named Hélène confronts the same existential dilemmas haunting the filmmaker — albeit in a much more "intense and romantic way" as Dufour-Laperrière puts it. His film is about French-Canadian radicals willing to take violent action.

Hélène is part of an armed collective who target an obscenely wealthy elderly couple at their fortified mansion. During a chaotic shootout with their target's security detail, Hélène backs out, leaving her comrades to die and instead embarks on a dreamy, soul-searching journey. She's haunted by her friends and her targets, alongside a little child and an older woman, all challenging her to consider the consequences of her actions and inactions, weighing the comfortable but meaningless life she could lead as the world crumbles around her or the way she will alienate everyone close to her in pursuit of a higher but costly ideal.

"The film is about two impossibilities," says Dufour-Laperrière, "the impossibility of violence first and foremost but also the impossibility of the status quo. Once you put violence in the world you don't control the consequences. And yet how can you live when the status quo is not possible. It's a tragic tale about two impossibilities meeting."

Death Does Not Exist doesn't address any specific political, social or global conflicts we're living through today, a narrative choice perhaps stemming from the very cautiousness the film is confronting. Though the question Dufour-Laperrière asks, through his characters, throughout the film can easily be posed to any of the most pertinent calamities today, especially since the abstract imagery is suggestive of so much: wealth inequality, food insecurity, the climate crisis and armed conflict are all there.

The project actually began with a real historical reference point. "I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland in contemporary Quebec," says Dufour-Laperrière, referencing the violent 1970s conflict when militant separatists in Quebec kidnapped a British trade commissioner and murdered Quebec minister Pierre Laporte. Those incidents pushed then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, allowing for a military occupation and mass arrests.

The October Crisis was the subject in Gilles Groulx's critical and confrontational documentary 24 heures ou plus. Dufour-Laperrière counts that film as an aesthetic and thematic influence, alongside Groulx's political coming-of-age drama The Cat in the Bag. He even cast Barbara Ulrich, who starred as seductive and restless young Montrealer in The Cat in the Bag, as the elderly wealthy woman confronting the young radical Hélène in Death Does Not Exist, achieving a circularity that's both eerie and poignant.

For Dufour-Laperrière, invoking Canada's past is a way of reminding that radical violent action isn't a foreign concept. "Violence is happening everywhere in a lot of countries," he says, "and we're surprised in the Western world when it emerges."

"I wanted to reflect on these issues, this radicality, but in modern days with a different crisis — social but ecological too — and mix it with a fantastic side that in my eyes illustrates the interior life of the characters."

At this point, I ask Dufour-Laperrière to consider the whole Cannes apparatus and its contradictions. The festival is hosting films that are touching on some of the most urgent crises of our time. They opened with "Ukraine Day," premiering three titles (Zelensky, Notre Guerre and 2000 Meters to Andriivka) about the war that has been raging for three years. They're also premiering Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a dark comedy about two brothers selling drugs out of a falafel shop in 2007; Yes, Israeli director Nadav Lapid's critical satire about a musician trying to compose a new national anthem after October 7; and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a documentary about the lives lost to Israeli offensives in Gaza. The last one arrives in Cannes mired by a tragedy not originally contained in the film. Its main subject, 25-year-old photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, was killed along with 10 members of her family in an Israeli airstrike, just days after announcing her film will premiere at Cannes.

While the festivals host these films, it also warns attendees attending to not make any political statements or wear such symbols on the red carpets and events. The stark opposition between Cannes trying to reflect and engage with the world at large in its programming while maintaining a comfortable, cozy and risk-averse decorum is at the heart of what Death Does Not Exist is about.

"It's paradoxical being in a peaceful country," says Dufour-Laperrière. "I don't bear direct involvement in it. But there are some people that are directly touched — them and their families — with what's going on in the world. And I guess they should be necessarily allowed to express their concerns. And these concerns are often, as you say, quite tragic.

"It's an impossible balance to find between the two. You can be moderate. But if the world isn't moderate, what are we going to do? Reality is unbearable for a lot of people."