Belgium / 2023 / 91 min / French with English subtitles / Dark Comedy
Man is a dog to man. The worst kind of dog.
LIFE’S A BITCH: 3 dog stories that humorously depict human beings, their loneliness and their search for love.
DIRECTOR: After studying law, Xavier joined the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD). Early on, he showed a predilection for dark humor and a certain propensity for shooting in black and white. In 2005, Rien d’insoluble / Nothing Insoluble, his graduation film, was selected for the Venice Film Festival. He then directed Le crabe/ The Crab with Christophe Hermans and co-wrote En compagnie de la poussière / With the Dust by Jacques Molitor (Locarno Festival). In 2014, he directed Dreamcatchers, a documentary on Belgian wrestlers, with Cédric Bourgeois. From 2011, he worked with Méryl Fortunat-Rossi on several short films: Mauvaise lune (nominated for the Magritte du cinéma belge), L’ours noir/ The Black Bear (250 selections, including Clermont-Ferrand, and some 40 awards, including the Magritte for best fiction short) and Le plombier / The Plumber (22 awards, including, once again, the Magritte for best fiction short). With Matthieu Donck, he directed Les tubes / Worms. He collaborated on the writing of shorts such as Kapitalistis by Pablo Munoz Gomes (nominated for a César and awarded at Locarno), Tiger (Alpe d’Huez) and Vihta (Jury Special Prize at Clermont-Ferrand) by François Bierry. In 2016, Xavier directed Je me tue à le dire/ Death by Death, his first feature film. This dark comedy is selected at Karlovy Vary, the FNC in Montreal and Sitges. It won several awards, including the New Voices/New Visions Award at the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Magritte for Best Screenplay and Best Actor. In 2020, he directed a new short entitled Sprötch/Squish (nearly a hundred awards and 380 selections, including Clermont-Ferrand). Eligible for the Oscar, Sprötch won the Magritte for Best Fiction Short and the European Short Film Audience Award. Xavier has just completed post-production on his 2nd feature: Chiennes de vies/ Life’s a Bitch.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT: This is not a film about dogs, but about human beings. The dog acts as a prism, revealing the negative side of our society, our relationship with our contemporaries and the world, our own animality (man is a wolf to man), our loneliness, our lack of love and reference points. He gives us a glimpse of the sometimes desolate, surreal, grotesque, delightful, tragic or cruel spectacle of the human comedy.
Contact: xseron@yahoo.fr Be For Films – Brussels
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