In Bestiaire, Denis Côté films animals - without commentary, without dialog, statically, by repeatedly setting up his camera in different places in Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Québec - and people looking at them. Mostly, however, he shows animals, or parts of them, because what do animals know about cadrage, the selection of the image section. So sometimes a lion's mane protrudes into the picture from below, then the whiskers of a tiger descend from above, sometimes a llama rushes past, sometimes the legs of a camel push through, the head of an ostrich twitches up and down, then a bison stops. Cattle repeatedly look at you and cast the viewer's gaze back over the fence, the border, the abyss that separates the filmmaker from the animal.
Canadian Côté, born in 1973, worked as a radio presenter and film critic before exploring the lyrical potential of what he found for the first time in 2005 in the immediately award-winning Les États nordiques. So while in Bestiaire the human interpretation of animalistic activity fails due to the fundamental otherness of the animal, this place - where wilderness and civilization meet - provokes questions about the relationship between freedom and power, strangeness and curiosity, existence and alienation. Listening ears in front of concrete. Giraffe neck with corrugated iron. Horn tips next to iron bars. Beauty in ghastly surroundings. An educational film.
