Director Karim Hussain in person!

A love triangle between a mother, son and daughter, LA BELLE BETE (THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST) is a dark drama on the themes of jealousy, vanity, emotional incest and, finally, murder. The film explores the complex psychology of a family; Louise (Carole Laure, SWEET MOVIE) is rich and vain; Patrice (Marc-André Grondin), her son, is as handsome as he is socially dysfunctional; Isabelle-Marie (Caroline Dhavernas, WONDERFALLS), the daughter, is dangerously jealous. Only one member of the family will make it - no matter what the consequences of his or her cruel acts.

Since it was published in 1959, Marie-Claire Blais's chimerical novel La Belle Bête has been considered unfilmable, a wild beast that cannot be tamed - until it came face-to-face with Karim Hussain. Hussain, the Montreal-based director behind two previous features, ASCENSION and SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY, and co-writer of Nacho Cerda's THE ABANDONED, is also well known to genre fans as one of the founders and long-time programmers of the Fantasia Film Festival.

Québécoise novelist Blais wrote La Belle Bête when she was only 17, and the book caused an uproar when it was first published. It was considered inappropriate for a young girl to have written such an angry, violent, incestuous novel, in which political and social parallels run like fissures through a twisted tragicomedy in which family members fuck, maim and kill each other in a sort of grim Grimm fable atmosphere. (The Hour)