Mademoiselle Kenopsia is centrally concerned with liminality—those spaces that oscillate between familiar and surreal, enduring in transitional stasis. The dimensions of transition can be temporal, as in sun-bleached plastic jungle gyms that evoke the passage from childhood, or spatial, as in secluded motels in the middle of road trip destinations.

No mere pandemic film (the script was largely written in 2015), Côté’s latest instead turns our current circumstances into a means for reflection, analysis, and confrontation with the very tools and convictions that have made him into one of contemporary cinema’s most prolific and unclassifiable directors. At a time when the very concepts of serious-minded filmmaking and theatrical exhibition are being called into question by streaming giants and IP managers with zero investment in the sustainability of the art form, Côté proposes that what’s needed if the cinema is to survive is not a reckoning with the notion of what is or isn’t a movie, but a re-engagement with the tenets of an author-driven cinema, achieved on its own unique terms.