The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“Slow, spooky, and poetically fucked up. In other words, perfect.”

John Waters, Vulture

Earning attention out of Cannes before appearing on notable year-end lists—John Waters’s included—A Prince is a picture almost impossible to pin down: an erotic learning-a-trade fantasy, populated by gardeners and gerontophilia, told by three narrators connected by an Indian character who is (for the most part) conspicuously absent. The film, set in a verdant and exceedingly gay Normandy, is the latest from filmmaker and farmer Pierre Creton, until now an artisanal crafter of fiction-flirting documentaries. Here, he fully exploits the pathways of desire and imagination—leading, in one unshakable scene, to a surreal burlesque of carnal exoticization—while preserving the specificity of his haptic, hands-in-the-land approach to filmmaking. Formally daring and, at times, destabilizing (the narrators’ voices don’t align with their onscreen counterparts), with a self-lacerating sense of irony not unlike Bruno Dumont’s provincial portraits, A Prince all but guarantees to provoke dialogue, debate, and admiration.

In French with English subtitles

One of the Top Ten Films of 2023
Cahiers du cinéma

“Creton here creates something entirely new and strange—a singular vision of a quietly eroticized natural world.”

NYFF 2023

“Surely one of the most kookily unclassifiable films ever to have screened in Director’s Fortnight … A film with a distinct, quiet voice, one that gently invites its audience into a rural world that is so far from the mainstream that it feels like another planet.”

Lee Marshall, Screen International