Bleu Tonnerre
2015 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Jean-Marc E. Roy, Philippe David Gagné
Genres: dark comedy, drama, musical
Tones: darkly comic, tender, whimsical
Bruno, a Québécois sawmill worker, loses his girlfriend, his home, and his job in quick succession after a miscarriage ends their relationship. He resolves to rebuild by pursuing his long-dormant dream of becoming a professional wrestler, supported by his sister.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Québécois sawmill worker, miscarriage, dream of wrestling, karaoke-musical sincerity. Twenty-one minutes. The combination of working-class drama and karaoke as formal register is genuinely unusual — Roy and Gagné went on to win Cannes' Short Palme d'Or. Trust the filmmaker.
A Cannes Directors' Fortnight selection from Québec that takes the premise of failed masculinity and routes it through amateur wrestling and off-key singing — earning an Illy Prize honorable mention for its singular tonal invention.
A Québécois sawmill worker losing everything and chasing a pro-wrestling dream, structured around deliberately rough karaoke-style musical performances — humiliation and longing as folk-musical sincerity. 21 minutes that risks tonal collision and lands it.
Festivals
- Festival de Cannes 2015, Illy Prize Honorable Mention
- Saguenay International Short Film Festival (REGARD) 2015, Prix créativité, Bourse de création régionale