The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) Trailer (2013)

Trailer for The Fifth Season.

Beautifully photographed in a palette of icy blues and cold earth tones, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s appropriately chilling contemporary fable draws on traditional peasant folklore to chronicle what happens when Mother Nature turns her back on a small Ardennes village and simply refuses to let winter give way to spring.

As they do every year, the villagers — including newly cemented young couple Alice and Thomas (Aurélia Poirier and Django Schrevens) — gather for the traditional bonfire celebrating the coming end of winter, only to have the pyre refuse to catch fire. It soon becomes plain that this is not just a baffling, if mildly ominous, occurrence. Even though time passes, the season stays the same. Perpetual winter — with crops failing, starvation increasing and barbarity on the rise — becomes the norm and the locals grow more desperate by the day… Spiked throughout with surreal visual touches and charcoal-black humor, Brosens and Woodworth’s eerie tale strikes home with the force and truth of the best kind of cinematic art.