Filmmaker Statement

Dumpster Duchess is a queer act of staying. I’m drawn to what gets left behind, places, people, desires that don’t resolve. In Montréal, decay doesn’t end things, it mutates and insists. The film lives in that persistence. There’s no fixed narrative, only drift. Four bodies move through a city that no longer promises anything, yet still demands to be lived in. I wanted to listen to what cinema usually cuts away, the hum of failing lights, the scrape of winter, the quiet violence of infrastructure. These sounds become a map of survival. Visually, the film sits between corrosion and saturation, where something exhausted still pulses. “Gas costs more than milk. I don’t get it. Make cows that produce gas.” Absurd, fragile, lucid. A way of thinking inside collapse. Dumpster Duchess stays with what remains. Raphë Co-director Dumpster Duchess www.raphe.ca