Incendies

Denis Villeneuve's fourth feature, adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's stage play, is the film that took him from Quebec to Hollywood — an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the Toronto prize for Best Canadian Feature, and eight Genies including Best Motion Picture. It is a Canadian-French co-production, shot largely in Jordan.

Lubna Azabal plays Nawal Marwan, whose will sends her adult twins — Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette — back to the unnamed Middle Eastern country she came from, carrying letters for two people they did not know existed. Villeneuve cuts between the twins' present-day search and Nawal's own decades, and André Turpin shoots the two timelines so that the country reads as one continuous place across forty years of civil war.

The film's reputation rests on how it handles that history: Mouawad's play is Lebanese in everything but name, and Villeneuve keeps the country unnamed without ever making it generic. At 4.45 on Letterboxd from 646,000 ratings it is among the highest-rated films in this catalogue, and its bus sequence remains one of the most discussed passages in 2010s cinema. Villeneuve had made nothing on this scale before and has not returned to this register since.