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Incendies (; ) is a 2010 Canadian drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve, who co-wrote the screenplay with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play of the same name, Incendies stars Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, and Rémy Girard.
The story concerns Canadian twins who travel to their mother's native country in the Levant to uncover her hidden past amidst a bloody civil war. While the country is unnamed, the events in the film are heavily influenced by the Lebanese Civil War and particularly the story of the prisoner Souha Bechara. The film was shot mainly in Montreal, with fifteen days spent in Jordan.
It premiered at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals in September 2010, and was released in Quebec on 17 September 2010. It met with widespread critical acclaim in Canada and abroad and won numerous awards. Since then it has been regarded as one of Villeneuve's finest works (with some considering it his best movie), one of the best movies of the 2010s and one of the greatest movies of the 21st century.
In 2011, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Incendies also won eight Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture.
A series of flashbacks reveal Nawal came from a Arab Christians family in a country, and that she fell in love with a refugee named Wahab, resulting in her pregnancy. Her family murders her lover and nearly shoots her in an honor killing, but her grandmother spares her, making her promise to leave the village after her baby's birth and start a new life in the city of Daresh. The grandmother tattoos the back of the baby's heel and sends him to an orphanage in Kfar Khout.
While Nawal is at university in Daresh a few years later, civil war and war crimes break out, with Nawal opposing the war on human rights grounds. Her son's orphanage is destroyed by a Muslim militant, Chamseddine, who converts her son into an child soldier. Nawal leaves Daresh to try to find her son and boards a bus full of Muslim refugees. Christian Nationalists shoot the driver and fire into the bus full of passengers, only missing Nawal and a mother with her daughter. As the Nationalists prepare to set the bus on fire, the survivors try to escape towards the back of the bus. Nawal shows her crucifix and tells the Nationalists that she is Christian. She attempts to save the girl by claiming her as her own, but the girl runs towards the burning bus, calling for her mother, and is shot dead. Nawal finds her way back to town and joins the Muslim fighters. She tutors the son of a nationalist leader, eventually earning enough trust to smuggle in a gun to shoot the leader. She is imprisoned in Kfar Ryat and sings through the screams of other prisoners, earning her the nickname "The Woman Who Sings". To attempt to break her, she is raped by torturer Abou Tarek who leaves her saying, "Sing now". She consequently gives birth to the twins.
After traveling to her mother's native country, Jeanne gradually uncovers this past and persuades Simon to join her. With help from Lebel, they learn their brother's name is Nihad of May (the month he was born in) and track down Chamseddine. Simon meets with him, and he reveals the war-mad Nihad was captured by the nationalists, turned by them, trained as a torturer, and then sent to Kfar Ryat, where he took the name Abou Tarek, making him both the twins' maternal half-brother and father; as such, both letters are addressed to the same person. Like Nawal, Nihad's superiors gave him a new life in Canada after the war. By chance, Nawal encountered him at a Canadian swimming pool and saw both the tattoo (proving him as her son) and his face (proving him as her rapist). The shock of learning the truth caused Nawal to suffer a stroke, which led to her decline and untimely death at age 60.
The twins find Nihad in Canada and deliver Nawal's letters to him. He opens both of them; the first letter addresses him as the twins' father, the rapist, and is filled with contempt. The second letter addresses him as the twins' brother and is instead written with caring words, saying that he, as Nawal's son, is deserving of love. Horrified at the truth, Nihad tries to chase after the twins, but they are gone.
Nawal gets her gravestone. Sometime later, Nihad visits it.
Director Denis Villeneuve first saw Wajdi Mouawad's play Incendies at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 2004, commenting "I had this strong intuition that I was in front of a masterpiece". Villeneuve acknowledged unfamiliarity with Arab culture, but was drawn to Incendies as "a modern story with a sort of Greek tragedy element". In adapting the screenplay, Villeneuve, while keeping the story structure and characters, replaced "all" the dialogue, even envisioning a silent film, abandoning the idea due to expense. He showed Mouawad some completed scenes to convince the initially reluctant playwright to grant permission for the film. Villeneuve spent five years working on the screenplay, in between directing two films. Mouawad later praised the film as "brilliantly elegant" and gave Villeneuve full credit. The project had a budget of $6.5 million, and received funding from Telefilm Canada.
Villeneuve selected Canadian actress Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin to play Jeanne, saying the role required listening skills and Désormeaux-Poulin is "a very generous actress". Before Incendies, Désormeaux-Poulin was mainly known for "light fare". Montreal actor Allen Altman, who played a notary, worked with a dialect coach for hours to develop a blend of the French and Arab accents before auditioning. While shooting in Jordan, to research his role, actor Maxim Gaudette toured a Palestinian camp near Amman.
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For the scenes filmed in Jordan, Villeneuve used a Lebanese and Iraqi crew, though he feared the war scenes would be too reminiscent of bad experiences for them. However, he said the Arab crew members felt "It's important that those sorts of stories are on the screen". Some of the filming in Jordan took place in the capital of Amman. To recreate Beirut, art director André-Line Beauparlant built up rock and debris on a street in Amman.
In the United States, the film was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. When the film was screened in Beirut in March 2011, Villeneuve claimed "a lot of people said to me that we should show this film to their children, to show them what they had been through".
In 2023, Telefilm Canada announced that the film was one of 23 titles that will be digitally restored under its new Canadian Cinema Reignited program to preserve classic Canadian films.Pat Mullen, "Oscar Winning Doc Leads List of Restored Canadian Classics". Point of View, 9 May 2023.
According to Box Office Mojo, the film completed its theatrical run on 29 September 2011, after making $2,071,334 in the U.S. According to The Numbers, the film grossed $6,857,096 in North America and $9,181,247 in other territories for a worldwide total of $16,038,343.
The film enjoyed a positive reception in its country and province. Kevin N. Laforest of the Montreal Film Journal gave it 3.5 stars out of four and wrote, "Villeneuve has done his best work yet here". The Montreal Gazette's Brendan Kelly gave the film five stars and called it a "masterwork".. Marc Cassivi of La Presse claimed the film transcended the play. Peter Howell, writing for The Toronto Star, gave the film four stars, called it "a commanding film of multiple revelations", and the best of 2010, and praised Lubna Azabal as "first amongst equals". However, Martin Morrow of CBC News was unimpressed, saying, "Villeneuve's screen adaptation strips away all this finely textured flesh and leaves only the bare bones". University of Berlin film scholar Claudia Kotte wrote that the film, along with Monsieur Lazhar (2011) and War Witch (2012), represent a break in the Cinema of Quebec from focus on local history to global concerns, with Incendies adding Oedipal complex. Authors Gada Mahrouse, Chantal Maillé and Daniel Salée wrote McCraw and Déry's films, Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar and Inch'Allah, depict Quebec as part of the global village and as accepting minorities, particularly Middle Easterners or "Muslim Others".
Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars, saying "it wants to be much more than a thriller and succeeds in demonstrating how senseless and futile it is to hate others because of their religion", and Azabal "is never less than compelling". He later selected the film as his favourite to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, though it lost to In a Better World from Denmark. Leonard Maltin also gave the film three and a half stars, referring to it as "tough, spellbinding". Ty Burr, writing for The Boston Globe, gave the film three and a half stars, praising a bus scene as harrowing but saying the climax is "a plot twist that feels like one coincidence too far", that "leaves the audience doing math on their fingers rather than reeling in shock". Incendies was named by Stephen Holden of The New York Times as one of the 10 best films of 2011. Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times called it Villeneuve's "best-realized work yet". A number of reviews complimented use of the song "You and Whose Army?" by Radiohead. Criticisms have included charges of melodrama and orientalism.
It won eight awards at the 31st Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, Best Actress for Azabal and Best Director for Villeneuve. Along with Incendies, Villeneuve won the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award in 2009 for the film Polytechnique, the first Canadian filmmaker to win it twice in a row. Incendies also won the Prix Iris for Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actress (Azabal), Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costumes and Sound.
It is also the only film to date to have won both the Toronto International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film and the Vancouver International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film.
In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 127.
| Best Director | Denis Villeneuve | |
| Best Actress | Lubna Azabal | |
| Best Adapted Screenplay | Denis Villeneuve | |
| Best Art Direction | André-Line Beauparlant | |
| Best Cinematography | André Turpin | |
| Best Editing | Monique Dartonne | |
| Best Sound | Jean Umansky and Jean-Pierre Laforce | |
| Best Sound Editing | Sylvain Bellemare, Simon Meilleur and Claire Pochon | |
| Best Makeup | Kathryn Casault | |
| Best Direction | Denis Villeneuve | |
| Best Screenplay | ||
| Best Actress | Lubna Azabal | |
| Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin | ||
| Best Art Direction | André-Line Beauparlant | |
| Best Cinematography | André Turpin | |
| Best Editing | Monique Dartonne | |
| Best Sound | Sylvain Bellemare, Jean Umansky and Jean-Pierre Laforce | |
| Best Costume Design | Sophie Lefebvre | |
| Best Screenplay | ||
| Youth Jury Award | ||
| Best Director of a Canadian Film | ||
| Best Actress in a Canadian Film | Lubna Azabal | |
| Best Supporting Actor in a Canadian Film | Maxim Gaudette | |
| Best Supporting Actress in a Canadian Film | Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin | |
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