Following the success of The Necessities of Life, Benoît Pilon goes back behind the camera Monday for his follow up feature Décharge (Discharge) for Forum Films and co-distributors Remstar and Alliance Vivafilm.

The $3.4 million drama will shoot over 30 days in Montreal and stars David Boutin (La grande séduction) and Isabel Richer (Babine) in a story about a man who turns his life around after a bout with drugs, but later finds his peaceful neighborhood and family threatened by street gangs and junkies. The script was co-written by Pilon and Pierre Szalowski (Ma fille, mon ange).

Décharge marks the first collaboration between Pilon and Forum producer Richard Lalonde (Ma fille, mon ange, The Terrorist Next Door), who met the filmmaker at Belgium’s Namur film festival in 2004, where Pilon was screening his award-winning doc Roger Toupin, épicier variété. The two hit it off and searched for a project to develop together, when Pilon pitched the idea for Décharge.

‘Benoît’s documentaries really triggered my interest. They are unique in the way they close in on the characters… he studies his characters with great empathy and gets the best out of them,’ Lalonde tells Playback Daily.

The film is a departure from Necessities, which solidified Pilon’s status as a dramatic director after collecting numerous awards and accolades in 2008. The tale about an Inuit hunter forced to come to Quebec City to be treated for tuberculosis in the 1950s was selected as one of TIFF’s Top 10 films that year and came close to an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film.

Necessities generated roughly $300,000 on 14 screens or less at the Quebec box office in 2008.

Décharge will be released in theaters next year.