Cinema Libre Targets Nov. 6 For The Domestic DVD And Blu-ray Debut Of Writer/Director Anne Émond’s Nelly

15 years in the making … and it did not start out as it ended.

Is that a riddle?   Or better put, an enigma?   Perhaps.   But when speaking of the life and times of Isabelle Fortier, Nelly Arcan and Cynthia — who are one and the same person — enigma is what you get.

Cinema Libre announced this past week that writer/director Anne Émond’s Nelly, her biopic on the life of French Canadian Isabelle Fortier— whose nom de plume was Nelly Arcan — but known to her adoring clients as Cynthia, will be available as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings on Nov. 6.

The film had its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2016, worked the international film festival circuit and foreign theatrical markets before getting a limited domestic theatrical release in September of this year.   This yields an ARR of 60 days.

The film, as does its central character, Isabelle Fortier (played by Mylène Mackay — Endorphine, La Bolduc), began as a film adaptation of her best-selling 2001 novel, “Putain,” but after her death in 2009, filmmaker Anne Émond (Nuit #1, Our Loved Ones) shifted gears and began writing a biopic about Fortier.   

According to published interviews with Émond, the initial process took a year-and-a-half and the completed first-draft script, by her own admission, was awful.  As she puts it, the story was true — every detail — but it did not capture the complicated nature of Fortier.   She was a stunning beauty, a gifted writer and a professional escort, with clients who spoke of her sensual talents in glowing terms … and at the age 36, despite fame and a very bright future, she killed herself.   

How do you write a straight-up biopic when there is so much more to the riddle of Isabelle Fortier’s life?   Émond started over and wove into her film, Nelly, the fabric of the person that her clients, friends and publishing colleagues spoke of, a woman who would be exactly what they wanted her to be.   Inventive, chameleon-like, or more bluntly put by some, “a liar.”

What emerge, first on paper, and then on film, are four different views of Isabelle Fortier … sex worker, lover, writer and the unknowable persona of a very complicated human being.  A diamond, but flawed … addicted, complex and unsure, but with an intellect that, perhaps, contributed to her ultimate undoing.  

Nelly is presented in French (with some English) and English subtitles.