Denis Côté's Seventeen Films, Zero Theatrical Guarantees

Denis Côté has made seventeen films—most working directors in North America will retire having made fewer.

Côté works in slow cinema, deliberately difficult cinema, where a scene can sustain itself for five minutes on a single composition and the audience learns to sit with what refuses to move. His latest, "Nobody's Violence," premières in main competition at Locarno. Before that premiere even happens, the world sales rights are already sold to Heretic—a sales agent operating on a principle you would not have encountered ten years ago in the arthouse market.

This is not a story about a filmmaker finding a buyer. This is a story about how the buyer finds the filmmaker first. The shift happened quietly—in the 2000s and early 2010s, theatrical distribution in North America came before everything else.

A Canadian auteur like Côté would make a film for festival prestige, yes. The real money came from arthouse cinema chains like the Alamo Drafthouses and Angelikas. Now the sequence has inverted—Heretic acquires world sales because streaming platforms are the default end market. Festival prestige is the currency that justifies acquisition to those platforms. The arthouse is no longer the primary customer. It is the proof of concept.

When Samuel Goldwyn Films represented Atom Egoyan in the 1990s, they were betting on theatrical viability in markets where serious cinema could still find an audience. When Heretic bets on Côté in 2024, they are betting on aggregate platform dollars, prize money. A director whose name carries enough prestige to anchor a catalog purchase. The filmmaker's actual market has not changed. The infrastructure supporting that market has simply collapsed and rebuilt around different pressure points.

This matters because it fundamentally changes what gets made. Not the story, not the form—those belong to the artist. But which artists get supported at all. Which difficult vision gets funded depends now on whether it can perform prestige before profit. The mechanism is invisible to the viewer.