What spurs us to action? How do we manage to break away from pain, collapse, or even the comfortable little ruts we carve out for ourselves?

IMPETUS is about what happens when a person who feels annihilated undergoes a profound transformation. You suddenly find yourself in a strange new place - a neutral one - and endure a period of immobility. But even as you feel that time has stopped, your next élan is being prepared...

No matter what genre I'm working in, fiction or documentary, I always start out by hunting for images. With IMPETUS, I wanted to blur the border between what was staged and what was not. Starting out with a flexible storyline, I put my actors in real situations, asking them to improvise with people in the streets of New York City. As I welcomed cinéma-vérité into fiction, I incorporated images of the film's ongoing scouting, into the film itself. I wanted to show how the very freshness of life can translate the gravity of human existence. The film became magical, showering us with surprises and moments of grace.

IMPETUS turned into a real filmic adventure, moving from male to female, Montreal to New York, pushing the boundaries of freestyle docufiction...

-  Jennifer Alleyn