Working at the edges of documentary and fiction, Gabrielle Brady and Denis Côté craft films that evoke emotional truths by bending the rules of cinematic form. From Island of the Hungry Ghosts’ poetic lens on trauma and migration to the nocturnal intimacy of The Wolves Always Come at Night, Brady blurs borders between the personal, the political, and the mythic. In Paul, Côté strips cinema down to its barest elements, constructing a raw yet enigmatic portrait of a man and his solitude, both entirely real and somehow otherworldly.
Together, they reflect on how hybrid cinema can reach for deeper truths than traditional realism allows. How do you work with people rather than "subjects"? What is gained when you invite artifice into real settings, or reality into stylized ones? And how can cinema move beyond representation and into immersion, intuition, and emotional resonance?
This conversation opens up the possibilities of expanded reality in film, not as special effect, but as a method of revealing something honest, tender, and unseen.
