Intro and The Devil's Breath
2021 · 15m · Canada
Directed by André Desrochers
Genres: documentary, essay film, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, whimsical
Sailors of the Suroit blame the Devil's hot breath for whitecaps on the Lachine Rapids after his lost battle against the continent's ice, while geologists offer a different explanation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would call this a documentary and move on; Desrochers calls it an essay film and makes you *feel* the difference—mythology and geology in the same frame, neither one winning, which is exactly the kind of productive contradiction that makes consensus taste look lazy.
A formally sophisticated negotiation between oral tradition and scientific narrative, where the editing itself becomes the argument: the film doesn't choose between the Devil's breath and geological fact, it positions them as equal realities, a move that situates it squarely in the essay film lineage while demanding real curatorial conversation.
The singular choice here is the decision to let the whimsical mythic voice—sailors' folklore, the Devil as character—breathe at *equal weight* to scientific explanation, never undercutting either; that restraint, that refusal to hierarchize, is what transforms what could've been a cute hybrid into something genuinely strange on a modest budget.