Remember when you were a child and you thought you’d like to write down your ambitions for your grown-up self? Perhaps you even decided to make a list of what you thought you could accomplish by the time you were a certain age?

The cast of La Bouteille, a first feature from Quebecois director Alain DesRochers, remembers exactly what it was like to record those what-I’d-like-to-be aspirations on paper, to put the paper in a bottle, and to bury the bottle (‘la bouteille’ in French).

In fact, in this 106-minute, bittersweet film, the two main characters, Francois and Real (played by Francois Papineau and Real Bosse), ‘buried it when they were kids and decide to dig it up on a specific day in the summer of 2000 to see if they’d lived up to the goals they set as kids,’ says coproducer Francois Pouliot. The storyline in the film, coproduced by Pouliot of YUL Films and Christian Larouche of Cinepix, then traces the impact of goals met and unmet on the lives of the people involved. Other key cast include Pascale Bussieres, Jean Lapointe, Helene Loiselle and singer Jean-Pierre Ferland.

Pouliot says DesRochers is a veteran of music videos, commercials and series tv. He says the two have probably collaborated on 100 or more videoclips, including pieces for Susan Aglukark, Celine Dion and a notorious video for Mitsou which was banned from the airwaves.

The pair also teamed for the short L’Oreille de Joe, the story of a man who gets his head stuck in a balcony railing and stays there all day because none of the people he speaks to seem to notice he’s in difficulty. Until the beautiful girl-next-door comes along, of course.

Meantime, La Bouteille was shot over 25 days, beginning in July 1999, in Richelieu on the south shore of Quebec. Pouliot says the set was unique, featuring its own childcare centre. Maybe it was the daycare, but the shoot went very smoothly for the $1.8-million feature, whose funders included sodec and Telefilm Canada during development (and Telefilm for post), Radio-Canada (licence fee), federal and Quebec tax credits, Super Ecran and the Canadian Television Fund.

Benoit Guichard wrote the script. Yves Belanger shot the picture in color on 35mm, while Eric Drouin edited and F.M. LeSieur composed the score.

La Bouteille is set for an Oct. 20 French-track release on 35 to 40 screens in Quebec. Depending on how well the French version does, and on how the English audience reacts to the subtitled version at viff, distrib Films Lions Gate may try an English theatrical run. *