Paul

The film was made from 1500 Canadian Dollars, two man crew and an insane dedication to these kinds of stories and type of filmmaking. Meet the Canadian director Denis Côté for a therapy-session-conversation after the screening.

A portrait of solitude, Paul moves with the quiet rhythm of a life pared down to its bare essentials. Shadows of anxiety and depression drift through the frame, but so too does an unexpected lightness, moments where play, submission, and ritual blur into something tender and restorative. Paul has found refuge in serving women who invite him to clean their homes. By sharing his gently eccentric routines on social media, he combats loneliness and takes it one day at a time.

Paul shapes a private language of connection: the gentle choreography of cleaning, the small theatre of performance, the safety of self-reinvention. The film lingers in the silences between gestures, attentive to the way vulnerability can become a kind of power, and to how identity might be pieced together from fragments of fantasy, discipline, and longing. With an unhurried gaze, it reveals a life lived in the margins—where care and control are renegotiated, where intimacy can be wordless, and where even the most unassuming acts hold the weight of survival.

Director’s statement:

Paul’s story is about small, defiant rituals that keep him here. It’s an invitation to look closer at what survival can quietly look like.