*Best of 2025 - Who by Fire - Director Philippe Lesage

A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multi-generational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage. Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous.

About the filmmaker - Philippe Lesage’s Who By Fire continues the French-Canadian filmmaker’s nuanced exploration of coming-of-age themes, but with a darker, more psychologically complex edge. Following his acclaimed films The Demons (2015) and Genesis (2018), Lesage’s latest work examines the perilous dynamic between youth and authority in the isolated setting of a wilderness lodge.