by Stéphane Malandrin , published on 15.11.2010

First of all, Kill Me Please is a film coming out in movie theatres on November 3^rd in France and Belgium (see the preview). It’s a film shot in an enclosed space, in three weeks, with a very small crew, the “commando” budget strategy that Belgian filmmaking has developed in the last few years and in the rebellious and independent spirit of C’est arrivé près de chez vous (it’s also Benoît Poelvoorde’s great return to dark comedy).

With the shooting crew and the director, Olias Braco, we immediately thought that the setting and the subject of the film would allow us to present the film to its audience in a different way. The whole film happens in a “suicide clinic”, a unique place with a theme that is both fascinating and revolting; the kind of place that our unhealthy curiosity pushes us to want to see, and that our reason orders us to reject. This kind of “death clinic” really exists in Switzerland. They are called “Dignitas et Exit”. They regularly appear in the news since they welcome people from all over the world that go there to commit suicide. But, since there is no real “Clinic” in an official building, Dignitas et Exit (which exists in parallel to Swiss law) often offer their services in a hotel room and sometimes, for lack of adequate structure, inside a car parked in a parking lot [http://www.invarietateconcordia.net/article-27071045.html].

During the shoot with La Parti productions and OXB, we imagined that a journalist doing a piece on the existence of “our” clinic – Dr. Kruger’s Clinic – was trying to penetrate it and reveal to the world images of the first Belgian suicide clinic.

This video story, which is not part of the film, was made during the shoot but with complete narrative independence (in collaboration with the scriptwriters), it exists separately but with the same actors and set and airs as several episodes on the RTBF website, which has become our transmedia partner.

The Belgian journalist Jerome Colin, who plays one of the nurses in the film, has accepted to put on the costume of the investigator on his own media RTBF, by creating a blog with details of his real/fake investigation.

We decided to push the narrative device so far as to create a website for our real/fake suicide clinic, independently of the blog , containing proselyte discourses of our doctor Kruger, which have nothing to do with the film (for the moment). Aurelien Recoing is the actor who plays Doctor Kruger in the film, for this unique experience, he has accepted to endorse the role of defender of medically assisted suicide, which we wrote for him. At the beginning of this adventure, we wanted to air the piece as being “real”, hoping to ride the wave of emotion linked to the discovery of a suicide clinic in Belgium, then we realized that it would be taking the risk of shadowing the movie, and the story, with a distasteful joke. We quickly changed strategies and decided to call this story an “unusual making-of”, even though it’s really more of a foretasted of the film and the development of its universe. The episodes are presently being shown on the RTBF website as well as on the film’s Facebook group.We are carefully following the reactions, which are rather good so far, of the Belgian audience. To top it all off, on November 3^rd, the film was visible exclusively on the internet for a limited number of internet users.

Other developments are still pending.