Cinema Releases - Hors Satan
By the Channel, along the Côte d’Opale, near a hamlet with a river and a marshland, lives a unusual guy who struggles along, poaches, prays and builds fires. A girl from a local farm takes care of him and feeds him. They spend time together in the wide scenery of dunes and woods, mysteriously engaging in private prayer at the edge of the ponds, where the devil is prowling...
Cannes Flm Festival 2011, Official Selection, Un Certain Regard
Bruno Dumont (born 1958, Bailleul, France) is a French film director. To date, he has directed six feature films, all of which border somewhere between realistic drama and the avant-garde. L'Humanite and Flandres won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Dumont has a background of Greek and philosophy.
Bruno Dumont
THE LIFE OF JÉSUS (La vie de Jésus) 1997
HUMANITY (L'humanité ) 1999TWENTYNINE PALMS (Twentynine Palms) 2003
FLANDERS (Flandres) 2006)
HADEWIJCH (2009) (2011)
HORS SATAN (2011)
Director/Screenwriter Bruno Dumont
Executive Producers 3B Productions, Jean Brehat, Rachid Bouchareb, Muriel Merlin
Cinematographer Yves Cape AFC
Sound Philippe Lecoeur
Editing Bruno Dumon, Basile Belkhiri
Sound Mixing Emmanuel Croset
Producer 3B Productions
In CoProduction with /CRRAV Nord-
Pas de Callais/ Le Fresnoy in association
with Cinemage 5
CAST
The Guy: David Dewaele
The Girl: Alexandra Lematre
The Mother: Valerie Mestdagh
The Kid’s Mother: Sonia Barthelemy
The Kid: Juliette Bacquet
“It could be the anti-hero who is supposed to be ‘outside Satan’ in Bruno Dumont’s latest film or it could be the remote, islanded world he inhabits…It is perhaps safer to say that he is outside both God and Satan…As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling…It’s a world in which grim brutality and glorious beauty can co-exist.
Bruno Dumont’s film-making is just so fluent, unnerving, gripping; he is entirely unique”
“A lucid dream of violence and beauty.”
Peter Bradshaw THE GUARDIAN
★★★★★
“Bruno Dumont always makes original, intense, at the same time, provocative movies.
Beautifully shot, capturing the landscape magnificently, by Yves Cape, Dumont forces the viewer to watch a different reality, mixing the disturbing and the beatification - it is at once fascinating in its sincerity and disquieting in its frankness, and it's hard not to admire the film's poetic honesty.
Rita Di Santo, MORNING STAR★★★★
"Mesmerising, beatific, disturbing, and leaves us pondering our own beliefs in a way few films do.”
Trevor Johnston, TIME OUT
★★★★
“Dumont – such a vital and necessary presence of the current cinematic landscape…Hors Satan is an investigation into the elastic nature of good and evil…If you’re interested in tackling questions pertaining to a higher power which are articulated in near-abstract terms, then you could do a lot worse than worship at the altar of Dumont.”
“With Hors Satan his most poetically and spiritually opaque film to date…“Bruno Dumont is nothing if not reliably contentious. And that’s why we love him.”We think it’s kinda brilliant.”
David Jenkins, LITTLE WHITE LIES
“His sixth, and perhaps most compelling…Dumont’s film appears to be dealing with a similar provocative theme, the notion of the closeness of the sacred and the demonic, the idea that good and evil, the Christ-like and satanic, are different sides of the same coin.”
Philip French THE OBSERVER
★★★★
"It’s not just a movie: it’s a cinematically motivated act of faith"
Tara Brady, IRISH TIMES
★★★★
"Dumont remains one of Europe's most divisive and challenging directors, with Hors Satan a prime example of his provocative, yet taxing minimal style."
Patrick Gamble, CINE-VUE
★★★★“A typically stark provocation…perplexing and compelling.”
David Parkinson, EMPIRE
Kieron Corless, SIGHT & SOUND
FILM OF THE WEEK: Hors Satan
“French provocateur Bruno Dumont’s latest Hors Satan…a disturbing enigma, it leaves us never quite sure of the nature of the bizarre phenomena we’re witnessing.”
Carmen Gray, DAZED DIGITAL
"This latter-day parable, about a drifter roaming the farmland of Northern France, sees Bruno Dumont taking over from the late Krzysztof Kieslowski as the high priest of European arthouse. It’s tough but rewarding viewing.”
Mike McCahill, MOVIEMAIL
★★★★ 'An intoxicating experience'David Jenkins Time Out
'A must-see among artfilm aficionados.'
Rob Nelson, Variety
‘Fantastic’
Gérard Lefort, Libération
'Using both longueurs and repetitions, Dumont has a way of holding our attention by refusing us the expected answers.'
Jonathan Romney, Screen
‘ Two non-actors with a matching absence of affect and complementary hairstyles—his slicked back, hers spiked up—tramp silently around the beautifully photographed dunes and marshes of northwest Normandy, engaging in strange rituals and precipitating peculiar outbreaks (including one of Dumont’s trademark sex acts). It’s a Stone Age tale, ascetic, enigmatic, and intermittently violent.’
Jim Hoberman, Village Voice
'Hors Satan transcends its own realist aesthetic and Dumont’s love of physical environment by veering toward the sublime. This narrative shift comes in the form of spiritual transformations that carry distinct religious overtones. Dumont crafts a film in which logic, reason and the structures of society give way to other forces, moving us outside our comfort zone into a space that can be described as other-worldly and highly personal. Directing with his customary discipline and mastery, Dumont once again impresses and confounds, raising as many questions as he answers.'
Toronto International Film Festival
Cannes 2011. Cannes Questionnaires #3: Bruno Dumont
Pressbook
Download zip files 6 photos
Hi res of poster
Read the Sight and Sound blog entry on Hors Satan
Read an interview of Bruno Dumont in Telerama (in French)