Promenades Nocturnes
Sound design and original music for Ryan McKenna's feature about early-onset dementia — a dreamlike portrait of a woman dissolving at the edges, told through the nocturnal wanderings of her mind.
Role
Sound · Original Music
Director
Ryan McKenna
Recognition
Prix Québecor · FNC 2022
Year
2023
The Story
Promenades Nocturnes is one of the most personal films I've worked on with Ryan McKenna — our third collaboration, after Le coeur de Madame Sabali and The First Winter. It's a 63-minute feature about a woman experiencing early-onset dementia, told not as a medical drama but as a poetic dissolution — the world becoming unstable, familiar places turning strange, time folding in on itself.
The sound and music had to mirror that experience. I designed a sonic world where the line between what's real and what's remembered keeps shifting — footsteps that echo wrong, ambient sounds that drift out of sync, music that starts in one emotional register and ends somewhere else entirely. The misty field, the wildflowers, the fog — the film's visual language is atmospheric and the sound had to live inside that same haze.
The film won the Prix de la diffusion Québecor at the Festival du nouveau cinéma 2022 and screened theatrically at Cinémathèque québécoise. Ryan and I have been working together for years now — he's one of those directors where the trust is deep enough that I can take risks and he'll tell me honestly whether they landed.