Alexandre Dostie’s BOA is a major, internationally co-produced short with filmmaking on a scale that surpasses many features. Shooting in the hills of central France, Dostie (Mutants, Je finirai en prison) successfully manages to trace a straight slither between an abbey of practicing monks down to a fitness gym in the centre of the local town; in doing so, he juxtaposes two different fraternities of religious attendance and daily ritual against one another. After an act of God tears the roof of the abbey asunder, what comes next is assuredly reptilian, conjuring scenes that creep in, take hold, and won’t let go. I knew immediately upon viewing that I had to learn more.
“I had a recurring dream for a while where this huge muscular man was crushing someone in his arms,” Dostie shares, who developed the story for this expansive piece at a screenwriting residency organized through the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
“A very strange dream … the man was lying in bed and I could only see his bare back, the feet of someone stuck between his legs, trying to escape. This image somehow got burned into my imagination. Ten years later, we’re in the middle of the pandemic, and I’m training in my apartment like a mad man trying not to go completely insane. And at that moment, I really felt like some crazy monk, living a life of silence and solitude and somehow not being at peace with it. This tension between spiritual and physical became very real to me. That’s when my strange dream came back in my mind… and it all clicked.”
Dostie’s “crazy monk,” at least in this film, is a young brother named Léonide, played with an all-in physical performance by actor Dimitri Doré. “The monastery you see in the film is a patchwork of four different locations: the old abbey of Lavaudieu being the centerpiece,” Dostie says, adding that director of photography Vincent Biron shot each historic location using an ALEXA 35 with 20mm and 40mm Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses — and a 24-290mm Angénieux long lens zoom to boot. “I also spent some time casting in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, and that’s when I met Dimitri Doré. His take on the character was so interesting,” Dostie says. “I loved that his acting background was a mix of cinema, theater, and circus.”
In the notes for this year’s Not Short on Talent selection, I mentioned some thoughts I’ve been having lately with respect to the future of filmmaking: as text and image generators become ubiquitous, how will we continue to justify straying from the path of least resistance?
“When they tell you it’s all about the process? Well, that’s exactly what you trade off with computer-generated work,” Dostie says. “The process is about climbing the mountain to get your shot. The process is about shooting a scene in a tiny crypt with an angry snake. The process is about getting down in the dirt — naked as you came — and crawling like a beast. Of course, sometimes you need a little digital hand (if you want a hole in the roof of your cathedral, for example), but otherwise the fun resides in taking the risk of doing the thing for real. To make a film is an adventure, and I love it just like that.”
Attending Cannes this month? Watch BOA, and all of Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent selections, on the Short Film Corner’s VideoLibrary.
Jake Howell is a Toronto-based writer and film programmer.
