USA / FRANCE
2011 / WORLD PREMIERE
1H30 / IN ENGLISH
Synopsis
Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette embarks on a road trip to move his mentally ill mother Renée across the country. As they encounter roadblocks in the present, we begin to flash back to moments from the past, giving us insight into this anything-but-ordinary mother/son relationship. Through musical montage, psychedelic sequences and real and imagined circumstance, Walk Away Renée raises questions about love, sacrifice, and the reality in which we live.
director:Jonathan Caouette
screenplay: Jonathan Caouette
cinematography:Noam Roubah, Andres Peyrot, Jason Banker, Jorge Torres
editing: Brian Mc Allister
music supervisor : Simon Raymonde
cast:
Jonathan Caouette
Renée Leblanc
Adolph Davis
David Sanin
Joshua Caouette
 |
Biography
Jonathan Caouette
American nationality. Born on November 26, 1973 in Houston (USA).
Filmography
2011 WALK AWAY RENÉE
2010 ALL FLOWERS IN TIME
2003 TARNATION |
production
PENELOPE MORGANE PRODUCTION
Gérard Lacroix / Pierre Paul Puljiz
Tel. +33 1 41 43 71 00
glx@morgane-prod.fr
coproduction
POLYESTER
Pierre Paul Puljiz
Tel. +32 2 851 10 29
Mob. +32 2 47 85 67 122
pierrepaulpuljiz@gmail.com
LOVE STREAMS AGNÈS B. PRODUCTIONS
Christophe Audeguis, agnès b.
Tel. +33 1 53 38 43 45
Mob. +33 6 03 37 24 64
christophe.audeguis@agnesb.fr
HUMMINGBIRD 72
Jonathan Caouette
sales
WILD BUNCH
Vincent Maraval
Tel. +33 1 53 01 50 30
gfarkas@wildbunch.eu
French press
Annie Maurette
Mob. +33 6 60 97 30 36
annie.maurette@gmail.com
Olivier Avellana
Mob. +33 6 11 71 48 02
olivieravellana@hotmail.com
internatinal press
PR CONTACT
festival@theprcontact.com
Phil Symes
Mob. +33 6 22 11 95 25
Ronaldo Mourao
Mob. +33 6 24 66 88 22
According to the cliché a film is always personal. But for his first feature film, Tarnation (2004), Jonathan Caouette, hit hard with the commonplace topic of autobiography. Since age 11, Caouette films his family and friends and others, he films himself and gathered an unbelievable amount of material in Super 8 and VHS. His memories are closer to a novel than a showing of holiday slides: a father soon vanished, a mother in psychiatric hospital, a childhood spent in institutions. Tarnation tells us how Caouette (de)structured himself. The home movie of a life, turned into a shelter from which to transcend his demons, and simply created on his laptop computer. Long before Youtube and its worldwide zapping-bazaar of net-surfers staging themselves, Caouette was organizing his personal records, transcending narcissism by a true talent for editing. Mummy becomes a crazy Hollywood character; her “shitty life” turns into a real beautiful film sponsored by directors Todd Haynes and John Cameron Mitchell, and creates a sensation in Sundance then in Cannes. With Walk Away Renée, Caouette revives the feeling of intimacy after having sorted out other people’s memories (All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2008, on a music festival). He comes back to his mother, whom he continues to follow on a knife-edge, between psychiatric check-ups and shaky life.
This film is not a Tarnation 2: self-fiction successfully drifts towards an atmosphere of paranoid science fiction, a genre he got acquainted with in his short film All Flowers in Time (2010, featuring Chloé Sévigny). Life on Mars, lives elsewhere and parallel, lives of your own: Walk Away Renée is pounding of all these lives whose tender and anxious music, Jonathan Caouette captures with his ears wide open.
 |
Léo Soesanto |
