The Thief Lives in Hell

Mockumentary: (Cinema) A hoax film that has the appearance of a true documentary and presents a fictitious story or defends a far-fetched thesis.

The story begins with the warning, "The elements of this film were found in a house that was about to be demolished."

What follows is the delirium of a young unemployed man who films the people of his neighborhood from his apartment window. Unable to leave his home, he captures from the third floor the insoluble universe, inhabited by misery and poverty of the world that surrounds him. To convince himself that he is not going crazy, he confides to a lady on a telephone line of anonymous depressed people.

Through the power of the images captured over the seasons, we are drawn into the strangeness of this growing charge of alienation that mingles with the coldness and blowing snow of winter. The viewer becomes a sort of confidant of a character (played in voice-over by Morin himself) in free fall.

And as the film progresses in its duration, we witness a hesitation, a marked passage where the Morin-Dufour tandem vacillates between fiction and documentary, probably surprised by the strength of this dramatic reality that rises up through this window-camera. For a while, the narration leaves all the room to the characters who emerge beyond appearances. We are on the thin line of this impossibility of making fiction and documentary cohabit. However, the filmmakers come back to the charge with a montage that binds everything together, a real stroke of genius since, although crazy, miserable, or excluded from our society, their characters inhabit hope by becoming love and friendship for this unbalanced man.

A landmark film from Quebec, made with little to no financing, it has been and still is a source of inspiration for many filmmakers of all kinds.

Christian Mathieu Fournier
Filmmaker