BETTER MEN

In a support group, Dave, a heavy-set man in his fifties, shares his story with difficulty. As he talks, the participants begin to stand up one by one…

  • GUILLAUME DOUCET
    Director
  • GUILLAUME DOUCET
    Writer
  • Hélène Mitjavile
    Producer
  • Mark Tilton
    Key Cast
  • Guillaume Trotignon
    Key Cast
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    BETTER MEN
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Dram-com, satyre
  • Runtime:
    11 minutes 14 seconds
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1920*1080
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - GUILLAUME DOUCET

Guillaume Doucet was raised in Rennes – Britanny. He was trained as an actor at the Ecole du Théâtre National de Bretagne, before performing under the direction of Stanislas Nordey for several years. He then became theatre director and artistic director of the groupe vertigo, a theatre company under agreement with the Ministry of Culture, with whom he created nine shows, and whose creations are performed today internationally. Better men is his first film.

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Director Statement

During a feminist research project, I discovered the world of the virility training courses and more broadly the masculinist nebula.
The film, which is a "documented fiction", is inspired in particular by two subjects:
- A company called Mankind Project which proposes the most followed virility training courses, the "New Warrior Training Adventure".

- The thought of a French masculinist, Julien Rochedy, former youth leader of the National Front, who left it out of regret for the "lack of virility" of some of its members. He created in France the Ecole Major, and spreads his thought on YouTube where his videos have tens of thousands of views. He himself is inspired by various Anglo-Saxon "masculinist thinkers".
I worked for the writing of the film based on different stories of journalists infiltrated in virility training courses, several reports, Rochedy's texts and videos, and a whole constellation of masculinist videos and sites.
For me, Dave is a lambda type, no worse than any other, whose anger and fear, mainly social and systemic in origin, are used for indoctrination purposes, as in any sectarian mechanism.
I wanted us to be able to love him beyond the eventual judgment, even to want to save him, before seeing him escape us and sink, until we finally leave him transformed and galvanized.
The idea of blurring the tracks by sowing clues that might suggest a meeting of anonymous alcoholics also serves this objective of identification: if we already knew we were in a virility course, we wouldn't be listening to Dave's story with the same ear.

For me, this film is militant, but it tries to go through the sensitive and not to produce discourse, preferring empathy to didacticism.
Each feminist breakthrough often leads to a conservative backlash, a masculine tension due to the fear of losing oneself by losing one's privileges. Now that a new feminist speech breaks free, the virility training courses and the expression of a masculinist thought are in full swing. Initially born in the United States, these movements are spreading in France and Europe at high speed, carried by media relays such as Eric Zemmour in France.
I see here an imminent danger, and an uninhibited violence whose springs I want to show. Seeking to name it as I perceive it: a ridiculously archaic and toxic thought that exploits the flaws of the still too weak and too scattered defence that we oppose to it. Which takes advantage of our inability to support feminist movements to the level of their vital necessity.