With ‘Nobody’s Violence – Violence du corps de l’autre’, filmmaker Denis Côté turns a deeply personal experience into an unsettling and formally daring exploration of death, grief, alienation, and the quiet violence of everyday life. Drawing on his own experience with kidney insufficiency, Côté follows Larissa, a woman navigating a world shaped by loss, uncertainty, and an improbable connection to an “angel of death.” Rather than pursuing social realism, Côté embraces ambiguity, abstraction, and a deliberately unconventional visual language, challenging audiences to sit with uncertainty and discomfort. As the film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Côté sat down with Asis Sethi to speak about the origins of ‘Nobody’s Violence’, his evolving relationship with cinematic form, and why, after seventeen feature films, he is more interested than ever in taking risks and making films entirely on his own terms.

Photo Credit: Vincent Biron.

Asis: I love the title, ‘Nobody’s Violence – Violence du corps de l’autre’. I don’t speak French, so I’m not happy that I can’t pronounce it properly.

Denis: It’s not a problem that you don’t speak French, because it was impossible to translate. Because in French, if you take it and really try to go word by word, you won’t get anywhere. It’s extremely, not deconstructed, but very poetic. It would exactly mean “the violence of the body of the other,” which doesn’t make sense. So we were looking for a solution, I’m telling you, for almost a month.

And it became this sort of abstract: ‘Nobody’s Violence’. It’s very, very floaty and it doesn’t mean much. So it’s not that I’m not satisfied with it, but it’s kind of catchy. It has nothing to do with the poetic aspect of the French title.

Asis: But I found it poetic because it seems like, you know, Larissa’s character is helping people who are going through grief. So there’s really no violence. There’s irony in that title itself. So for me, I thought it was very poetic.

Denis: Yeah, you’re right in the sense that nobody is appropriating that violence to herself or himself. It’s more like all these microaggressions that we live with in our daily lives, if you want. But again, I’m saying that because it’s the English title, and I would never say that in French.

In French, it would just be this poetic phrase that I picked from a French author’s book, and nobody would ever say it this way in French. So now it’s like I’m trying to put some light on my English title. It’s very weird, but I understand your question. If we go back to the film, it’s just that nobody’s responsible for all the violence we have in our daily lives, and at the same time, we’re all responsible. So there’s this abstract gap that I like in the choice of that title, you know.

Asis: The film opens with a long, observational master shot that establishes Larissa’s world through stillness, sound and subtle movement, while also quietly foreshadowing what’s to come. You then shift into more intimate extreme close-ups of her. What motivated these visual choices, and how did you use the camera to serve Larissa’s character and the story?

Denis: It’s a bit hard to talk about visual grammar now, in the sense that I’m getting older. It’s my seventeenth feature film, as you know, and at some point you stop intellectualizing all this, not that it doesn’t make sense; it’s just that you feel like a prisoner of your visual style. So it’s less like my very first films, where I was trying to put the actors on their axes and be careful with the lights and the camera movement. And that became so- I felt very, I needed to change something and find more liberty. I think that happened with my 2017 film, ‘A Skin So Soft’, with the bodybuilders. 

Then I made an experimental film called ‘Wilcox’, and then there was ‘Ghost Town Anthology’, and I discovered I was talking less and less on set and in preparing the films. The visual grammar of it all made less sense. It’s not that I don’t want to intellectualize anything, but coming to this film now, I wanted to have a reaction to this perfect image we have in Quebec and Canadian cinema. We’re living with this Netflix kind of aesthetic where everything is performative, everything is very nicely constructed, everything is composed. And usually when you say “great cinema,” it’s connected with aesthetics.

I think everything now is performative, and I think, getting older, I want to punk-ify everything in some sense. I’m so afraid of becoming a bourgeois filmmaker, a narrative, bourgeois filmmaker that makes everything so clean. So if you saw other recent films, let’s make an exception with ‘Mademoiselle Kenopsia’; you can feel I’m reacting to the film industry, or the visual propaganda around it. But that said, you talked about the opening shot. I felt I was talking about something very, very dark, and I didn’t want to film anything in an explicit way, so I found ways to take a step back.

What I really like about this opening is that it’s not that kind of authorial, odd, authoritarian cinema with a long fixed shot; it was a way of playing with the audience, a bit like, “trust me, just look at this scene,” and then, “trust me, we’re going to go somewhere else.” That was the opening for me. And also, while you were talking, I was looking for a word in English; it’s better in French, but in English it would be a sort of decency. If you’re about to talk about death, you don’t want to do it in a cynical or too brutal way, and I was always looking for decency in those scenes. So you never see the act of dying. I was more interested in the alienation of the character of Mira.

And also, the other thing is, when I watch a film, I really like that moment, sometimes it’s a whole film, that feeling of “what the hell am I watching, where the hell am I going.” It’s very frustrating for a big part of the audience, but for me it’s so exciting. I never know what the next scene will be; I might be bored at times, but this feeling of not knowing what you’re watching reminds me of discovering Claire Denis’s cinema in the early 2000s. Let’s say a film like ‘The Intruder’; I don’t know if you remember it; I saw it five or six times, I still don’t know what it’s about, and I love those films.

But we live in Canada, and we have to write scripts that are tight; we need to convince the institutions for funding, so we have to put everything on paper. Now that I have a better reputation, I can just send them a fifty-page script, and they’ll understand I can do something with it. So this opening, it’s very long on screen, but on paper it’s maybe just a sentence. But then we play with the form. Overall it was about decency, and that first shot had to show you all the levels of decency the film might propose. Then we go a bit tougher; we go for close-ups, and, you see, I’m telling you, I don’t care or think about visual grammar. And then I think a lot about it, you know.

Asis: You do. I was just going to say that, because you use distance, right? We don’t know the character; you’re using that distance. And then you give us the intimacy part as well, where we look at her right in the face. I felt you did it very beautifully.

Denis: I’m obsessed with visual language, so I try a lot of stuff. My whole career is hit-and-miss. I love trying; I don’t want to succeed, I don’t care. As you can see, I’ve made seventeen films, and I’m still not, you know, I’m just trying stuff, like a painter would paint every day. You never know if what you’re painting is a major piece, or just something you painted on a Wednesday. So that’s how I approach every film; every scene is a tryout, you know?

Asis: The ending brings the film full circle, echoing the opening shot, while even the briefest characters are given a strong sense of humanity and purpose. Similar to your other films, there’s also a sense of challenge and confrontation in the way you tell the story. Did you intentionally want to create a sense of discomfort or a particular emotional response for the audience, especially through the editing?

Denis: No, but you said my cinema is challenging, which is a word I like, because I come from hard cinephilia; I was almost a film critic. I always took cinema as something exploratory more than a narrative, entertaining experience. At first I made films for myself; up to my fifth feature film, I think I was making cinema for myself. Then I made a film called ‘Bestiaire’, and I started considering the audience. I started listening to reactions to the film, and it was so polarized and fascinating; some people thought it was boring, funny, scary, and I was like, okay, there’s an audience out there watching my stuff. I discovered that at my sixth feature film.

Now I really think about the audience, but a certain type of audience. I’m going to sound very arrogant, but there’s a certain type of audience that’s not for me. I don’t care anymore; I’m not trying to go get them. Not the commercial audience, but you know what I mean. So when I make a film, I’m thinking about the five thousand cinephiles in the center of Montreal. I want them, and I won’t fight for the rest; I’m making cinema for them. The other thing is, I don’t like provocation. I used to like it in the beginning, “oh, they’re going to hate me for this”, but now it’s more a construction around the language of cinema: rejecting psychology when it’s not necessary, bringing back an informational piece of dialogue here and there.

It’s more like a little puzzle, and it makes a sort of hole in my head; I just hope it’s going to make sense for the audience. But every time I’m losing somebody there, there, there, is it a problem? Yes and no. I like the fact that it’s impossible to like my films as a whole. It’s frustrating, it’s hard. Some days you wake up, and you’d like everybody to love your work, and some other days you’re like, “I’m this author, and nobody understands my cinema.” So I’m thinking about the audience, but I’m very free. You need to know that I’m very free; I never did commercial TV, I was always super lucky to earn a living just making my films. I know it’s a bit surprising; we could go film by film and see how I made money to live, but I’m so lucky; everything I did is a film by Denis Côté. So you wake up at fifty-two years old, and you’re like, wow, I can do what I want.

Asis: I want to go back and talk about what sparked the idea for this film particularly. Was it the character? Was it an idea about “violence,” in quotes? Was it an image, or something else? What sparked the idea for this particular script?

Denis: It was life, in the sense that, maybe you read about it, but I lived for eighteen years with kidney insufficiency. And I was going towards something. I didn’t know anything about dialysis or a transplant, and that’s very scary when nobody knows. We know what dialysis is, but “am I going there?” So I didn’t know where I was going. I still had some energy to write something, so I started writing something for Larissa. First of all, I wanted her to be the main character in something, and I started writing, and everything was about myself. It was not autobiographical, but it was about myself. If you look at the character, she’s just floating in the world; she’s walking on the idea of death, exactly what I was living.

Not that I would die, but what is a transplant? I had fifteen percent kidney function when I was writing, so everything I was writing was fragments, memories, traces of my condition. So you have this character who’s going from one shitty part of her life, and she’s trying to get to the next point, and we all know she needs a new life. And she’s alienated by everything around herself. I was totally confused with the world, because I was living with toxins in my brain, and I had a veil in front of my eyes all the time because I was always tired and I could not connect with the world around me. So the script is somehow my life.

So that’s what I really like about it, and I guess that was the point of departure. So now I got a transplant, I look at the film, I can see it’s very, very dark, but it was a part of my life, and I recognized myself. And yeah, the content of the film is kind of me; it’s an homage to Larissa’s talent. And form-wise, it’s still a reaction to the clean cinema being made all around Canada.

I didn’t want to make a social film. You know that in Canada we have medical aid in dying; it’s very accessible. Quebec is champions of the world right now; it’s nearly a problem. I knew we had that in the Canadian health system, but I wanted to create something that is completely improbable, pretty dystopian, like people are using the service of this angel of death, and she’s connected to a shady organization. Maybe that organization is connected with the government; we have no clue who these people are. That was really funny to write; it doesn’t exist. So I’m rejecting the social aspect of the question to make it more cinematic. And if you look around, there will be tons of documentaries that are very social about the question and stuff. So I’m really happy that I went into left field of the question, you know?

And it makes me laugh, because I have a better relationship now with improbability. When you write something that is not possible, let’s play with that idea, you know? And social realism, I’m quite fed up with it. I don’t understand why we imitate life when we make a film. So yeah, I can still watch those films, but why do we imitate life when we make cinema?

Asis: What a beautiful thought! Thank you so much for your time Denis.

Denis: My pleasure!