THE FIFTH SEASON / LA CINQUIÈME SAISON

Directors Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth are making a career of exploring strange and distant lands. In 2006 with the award-winning Khadak, an intoxicating journey across the steppes of Mongolia. In 2009, the pair travelled high into the Andes of South America to film Altiplano, a lyrical exploration of sacrifice and redemption. Now, for the duo’s most recent collaboration, co-director Brosens returns to his native Belgium to undertake a different kind of journey, one that plunges deeply into the surreal.

In a secluded village deep in the Ardennes, a community gathers to set alight an effigy of Uncle Winter atop a mountain of brush. When the pyre refuses to burn, winter cannot pass into spring and nature stagnates: the bees disappear, seeds refuse to sprout and cows no longer offer milk. Desperation turns to madness as the villagers suffer the deterioration of their land, their relationships, their bodies and their minds. As the adult world crumbles around them, three adolescents – Alice, Thomas and Octave – toil on the farms, explore the deep forests and attempt to make some sense of the chaos that has engulfed their village. Alice and Thomas are in a budding relationship, while Octave watches the world from his wheelchair, perked atop his parents’ food truck. For all three, without the turning of the seasons, maturation remains just out of reach. The villagers turn on each other as the natural order collapses, engaging in strange, farcical acts of malice. In the end, only the prospect of human sacrifice offers them any hope.

Brosens and Woodworth compose this mad elegy to the land with their signature brand of surrealism, playfully manipulating scale and perspective while Hans Bruch Jr.’s camera glides past wintry tableaux reminiscent of Tarkovsky. A veritable symphony of the unusual, the sad and the strange, The Fifth Season is as unsettling as it is striking.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto IFF