Debuting this week in the short-film competition at Montreal's Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma, is a film from ScreenAnarchy's own Canadian Editor, Shelagh Rowan-Legg. Dans Les Pins plays out via letters read aloud, in which a young woman tells of her job at a hotel in the Laurentians, where she is courted by a wealthy man.
The hauntingly high-grain key art for the film is from German designer and graphic artist, Miro Denck, whose name makes the rare appearance in the credit block (alongside the handsome logo for La Distributrice de Films, of a woman saluting).
Denck has done superb work for filmmakers as diverse as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gaspar Noé, Hong Sang-Soo and Denis Côté. While I could wax on about the hazy black & white understatement, with its sturdy serif'd typesetting, instead, here is a quote directly from the designer, himself:
"I wanted to capture the eerie atmosphere of the hotel via my own take on the past — just like the film does with its mixed media form — and aesthetically echo some of the scary cinema of the 70s which managed to bring forward some timelessly spooky classics with a much more minimalist approach — as opposed to todays overkill of CGI and special effects. Less is more sometimes, and there’s great films in history that stand testament to that."