90 minutes – Drama
Release date: January 24, 2014 (Québec, Toronto, Ottawa)
Canadian distributor: Les Films Christal
International distributor: eOne Entertainment

After being provoked into a sudden (and spectacularly executed) act of violence, a taciturn widower (American actor Thomas Haden Church) drunkenly pilots his snowplow into the depths of a wintery Québec forest and sets about living as an outlaw. Converting his stranded vehicle into a slapdash shelter, he clumsily scrounges sundries from nearby cabins, comically serving notice that he’s hardly a natural born bandit. Mirroring our anti-hero’s increasingly delirious, sleep-deprived psyche, the reeling film flits about chronologically, methodically revealing the trauma that left him the broken man he is and the torment that landed him in this predicament. The film is, in turns, loopy, tragic, morbidly amusing and suspenseful.

Director and actor Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais won the 2014 Claude Jutra Award for Whitewash. Awarded by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, the Claude Jutra Award is sponsored by Telefilm Canada.