Interview with a Free Man
2015 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Nicolas Levesque
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
Several men seeking a fresh start answer job-interview questions, each answer revealing glimpses of their lives, hopes and fears through oblique, expectation-defying narration.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a job interview that's not about jobs—which should be boring, but Lévesque twists the form into something genuinely unhinged, letting absurdist gaps open up between question and answer until you're not sure what document you're actually watching.
A precise essay film that inherits the DNA of the structural documentary and the philosophical interview tradition, where formal restraint—the static frame, the measured pacing—becomes the condition for genuine vulnerability to emerge.
The entire film turns on a single formal decision: letting the men's narration run sideways to their own words, creating this gorgeous dissonance where what they say and what we hear about them are in productive, painful contradiction.