MONTREAL — With her second feature Signes vitaux, Quebec director/writer Sophie Deraspe artfully explores a fundamental question: What do we need when we die?

The picture, which premieres at this week’s Festival du nouveau cinéma, is the only Canadian flick up for the fest’s $15,000 international Quebecor Louve d’Or prize. Festival programmers were wise to put this homegrown film up against their selections from around the world.

What sets Signes vitaux (Vital Signs) apart is its deftly crafted script and the director’s unusual and inspired decision to cast a disabled woman, Montreal-based dancer and artist Marie-Hélène Bellavance, to play the central character, Simone, who abandons her boyfriend and her studies to take care of the dying. Bellavance’s legs are cut off just below the knee.

‘I saw Marie-Hélène dance and she was magnificent. She is luminous. She has a vulnerability and a strength. I thought she would work very well visually,’ recalls Deraspe.

She wrote the script for Bellavance, who walks with the help of prosthetic calves and feet. ‘She was afraid because she’s not an actress. It was a process that lasted two years,’ says Deraspe.

Set in palliative care home during a bleak Montreal winter, the story follows Simone as she becomes obsessed with caring for the dying after she loses a close family member.

‘I was interested in dying and our relationship with others,’ says the thoughtful 35-year-old director. ‘Life goes very fast and I am trying to figure out what we should hold on to. What should we take the time for?’

Through the course of the film the determinedly self-sufficient Simone discovers that she is indeed vulnerable and needs other people, explains Deraspe. ‘Because she is missing part of her body, Marie-Hélène represents youth, beauty, strength and vulnerability. Her body itself expresses a need for the other. She needs to fill the gap.’

And although Signes‘ landscape of dying patients and their cold institutional environments is at times too stylized, the film has a profound humanity due to a solid script, astute direction and the performances of Bellavance and Francis Ducharme, the actor who plays her boyfriend, Boris.

Signes vitaux is produced by Nicolas Fonseca of Les Films Siamois and is distributed by Métropole Films