GENESIS (GENÈSE) World Cinema

Guillaume is an outwardly confident teenager in a posh boarding school. Intelligent and brash, he veers between likable and overbearing both in the faculty’s and his fellow student’s eyes. When surprising new feelings of love and alienation consume him, his veneer of composure begins to crack. Meanwhile, his older sister Charlotte has just wriggled free of a disappointing relationship with her boyfriend, and travels down a new, thorny path with an older suitor whose rebellious charm may blind her to inevitable heartbreak. Together, Guillaume and Charlotte’s parallel stories form a detailed, incisive portrait of adolescent yearning from Québécois director Philippe Lesage, whose AFI FEST 2016 entry THE DEMONS manages to subtly extend its reach into this film’s narrative. – Mike Dougherty