Cannes 2025 (Directors’ Fortnight): Death Does Not Exist | Interview with Félix Dufour-Laperrière
“It is our collective responsibility to keep the world livable and decent,” director Félix Dufour-Laperrière told us, as we discussed his latest animated feature, premiering at the 57th Directors’ Fortnight.
Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s third animated feature La mort n’existe pas (Death Does Not Exist) makes you wonder about life and philosophy, the idea of existence, and of making the most of what life has to offer. This tragic tale is of a young woman’s convictions and upheavals in life, all told in a 72-minute feature animation. The Canadian animation filmmaker takes us on a journey of knowing the unknown about life and living it well. This film was shown at the 57th Quinzaine des cinéastes (Directors’ Fortnight), as part of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
“When I write scripts, I think about movements, image, and often quickly in the writing process about an animation technique. It’s deeply rooted. It’s at the heart of my practice. It’s animated image that was planned at the very beginning as an animation film. And the animation is permitting a lot in what can be represented.”
For Félix Dufour-Laperrière, it permitted a whole fantastic side into this tragic tale, for he feels that it can embody the character’s intimate life and make it visible for the viewer, which is powerful. He adds, “There is a tension with abstraction within the film, but within the animated image also, because you have to deal with the absence of body and faces, and then you have to take that in charge into your mise-en-scène to make the characters believable and to offer them a certain depth.”
Dufour-Laperrière loves this medium but agrees it takes time—like this one took four years in the making: writing, funding, and shooting.
“First year and a half alone with my main animator, Yoon-Jin Park. We prepared everything. And then a bit less than three years with all the team, in Montreal mainly for 80%, and partly in France. It was a France and Canada and Quebec co-production,” he explains.
The director states that this film is a tragic tale full of paradox and contradictions, and the title itself is a paradox. “As they’re young, they hope to be stronger. They hope to escape from the fatality that they’re fighting. Yet they will touch it, so it will exist. It is hope and fatality at the same time.”
He is concerned about the future and feels that he has to try to explore it.
“I am worried about the state of the world. I’m the father of two. I’m worried about the world that they will live in. I feel it is our collective responsibility to keep it livable and decent, which isn’t always the case. I’m aware I’m a privileged man living in a peaceful country. I’m making films, which is a big privilege. We are full of contradictions, and I wanted to explore that.”
Thus, these contradictions and concerns become the premise of his story, which he tells using a faded colour palette—a deliberate idea to structure his film as a sequence of colour fields.
“In my mind, it’s a sequence of colour. Then there’s the story, characters, and backgrounds that are emerging from this sequence of colour fields. I had a limited palette. I painted it on paper, with about 40 colours. Each sequence has its own limited palette that I tried to respect. It was a bit like painting, like putting addition and subtraction. It was a pretty intuitive process, putting the animated line into colour. It was a lot of fun. A lot of work, and a lot of fun.”
Though he points out that it was on purpose that, within the script, the decision was made not to always distinguish characters and backgrounds, so the characters are set in a specific context:
“The characters are linked to their context. When they share a shot, they share the context, and they’re binded. There are big upheavals that are materialization of the conscious and unconscious desire of the character. It gets out of control. It is conscious, so they want political and collective change. There’s an ecological side to it. But when they put it violently into the world, it gets out of hand, out of reach, and it stumbles, and it materializes in some paradoxical forms, like these diverse wolves full of life and death.”
In his eyes, it’s also the embodiment of Helen’s anger.
“This is the raging and dying anger. It is a fight between movement and fixity, between immobility and change and evolution, between life and death. I imagine they have very precise political discussions for themselves, but I wanted to get to the action and to see the consequence and the moral contradictions that arise afterwards.”
Félix Dufour-Laperrière uses his anger, contradictions, and worries to take the story forward.
“It is a tale, so it has an intensity that is specific to a tale. In a tale, specifically in a fantastic and tragic one, there’s some level of intensity.”
He has the last word.
Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 78th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.
