Refocus: The Films of Denis Villeneuve

The nimble, creative spirit of Québécois screenwriter and filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve, is reflected in his varied body of work. Villeneuve explores questions of alterity and interculturality, of language and identity, of memory and forgetting, of violence and retribution, throughout his filmography: Un 32 août sur terre (1998), Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), Incendies (2010), Enemy (2013), Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), BladeRunner 2049 (2017) and Dune: Part 1 (2021).

This edited collection brings together original works of scholarship on all of Villeneuve’s feature films from different theoretical approaches, in order to deepen our understanding of this important and yet relatively understudied director; read individually or as a collective whole, these studies reveal important elements of Villeneuve’s filmic practice, as well as the evolutions of his oeuvre.

Jeri English is an Associate Professor of French and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada). Her teaching and research areas include feminist literary, film and cultural theories, contemporary French cinema and 20th and 21st century French women writers. She recently published a chapter in Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema (EUP, 2019), and has an article appearing in a forthcoming issue of Dalhousie French Studies. Her current research project examines the monstrous, the abject and the uncanny in contemporary Science Fiction films.

Marie Pascal is an Assistant Professor of French and Québec literature and film at King’s University College at Western University (Canada). Her research deals with the questions of the Other and abjection in the arts. She has also written on the reception of cinematographic adaptations - which she calls ’transcreations’ - in the Québec canon. She has previously published works in Revue d’études cinématographiques, and ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan (EUP, 2019). She is currently directing an issue of Dalhousie French Studies dedicated to the concept of abjection in literature and cinema and recently founded Transcr(é)ation, a journal dedicated to adaptation and transmediality.