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“It was not written or storyboarded,” she says of the film. “It was an improvisational process. The process was as interesting and as important as the result.”

Roy has worked with Bouchard before. “I was confident he could do something even if we didn’t know at first what it would be.”

Bouchard had begun with the image in his mind of a face looking down on its double. And so he spent four months with sculptor Dany Boivin – just one member of a vital creative team – creating a life-size model of himself out of plastiline, a substance somewhere between wax and clay in consistency. But he found it difficult to make the first cut in the model. “I wasn’t able to open up myself,” he says, again literally.

Says Roy: “At some point, I told Patrick, I think you should start shooting. I think you’re there.” And so the animator in the film draws a knife along the foot of his double, revealing a nail that is just one of a number of images drawn from religion, science and Bouchard’s own background. (Any references to Frankenstein in its bicentennial year are, he adds, purely coincidental.)

This is Bouchard’s first trip to Cannes. “I’m really excited,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place. People have been really good to me.” As to being the lone flag-bearer for our nation at a festival that has often fêted Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Atom Egoyan and others, “It’s a shame for Canada, but for us it’s pretty nice. We’ve had very good press coverage.”

He and Roy are also looking forward to meeting fellow filmmakers and especially animators – three of the 10 shorts in the Directors’ Fortnight program are animated. “The human experience is so rich, to share those high emotions with other filmmakers.”

That’s not all there is to share on a film like this. After the making of a life-size double, Roy says, “he did his face in chocolate for my birthday. It was a bit strange, but the chocolate was really good.”