Nominated for Best International Feature
Q&A with director Alexa-Jeanne Dubé
Content Warnings – discussion of rape, drugs, and violence
Sweet Sixteen presents eight 16-year-old girls that unveil themselves through their bittersweet monologues. All highlighted in an evocative and poetic setting, the characters deliver on different themes; self-image, eating disorders, anxiety, their first love, their first kiss, friendship, sorority, sex, rape, incest, social media, social and political revolts.
Beautiful, untrammelled wooded countryside would seem an unlikely backdrop for this self-described ‘symphony’ on every internal and external problem confronted by the urban youth of today. But the setting admirably serves this film’s key theme of escape, or more specifically, what the character Little Witch calls ‘the art of escape’: not merely into nature, but into the music industry, the film industry, Instagram, ‘a brand new world’, pot, coke, orgies, Shakespeare, Milton, the sky; Death.
Unnerving makeup effects by Alexandra Plourde-Gauthier underscore that the young performers are to be marvelled at, yet neither admired nor pitied. Little Witch herself, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, is seen crawling into a square of fallen bluescreen material on the forest floor, as if being born in reverse, an act reminiscent of the performance art of the late Joseph Beuys.
In a gravel pit in the ‘symphony’s’ third movement, ‘Violence’, the character known only as Slut (Doriane Lens-Pitt) makes bonfires appear around her, as if spontaneously generating them through the palpable rage with which she tells her harrowing story of brands, bands, and boys.
Directed and adapted from Suzie Bastien’s final play, Sucre Seize, by prolific Canadian actress-writer-director Alexa-Jeanne Dubé.
Daniel MacCannell
This film is Triple F Rated.
