Victor Pellerin has been missing for 15 years. After a short burst of fame in the Quebec art scene, he reclaimed all of his paintings, set them aflame and disappeared. Or did he? Sophie Deraspe’s sprightly genre-busting hybrid follows a group of Montreal artists as they prepare for an anniversary show centered around Pellerin’s absent work. Aging at variable rates out of their bohemian pasts, this clique of Pellerin’s former friends leads Deraspe on her search for the enigmatic artist. Along the way, friendships suffer under the influence of a strange South American drug, and Deraspe turns the camera on herself and her subjects for a jaw-dropping game of two truths and a lie. Like Orson Welles in his film F for Fake—also a multilayered look at the international art world—Sophie Deraspe calls the truth of her own film and our willingness to trust the documentary form into question, and does so with a cutting sense of humor. Michael Atkinson, in a recent issue of Film Comment, writes that the film’s “evasive zigzag around ‘reality’ serves as a deft backhand slap at the whimsical, emperor’s-new-clothes absurdity of the international art world.”

Written by Sophie Deraspe. Photographed by Sophie Deraspe (102 min, Atopia Distribution).