Celine Bonnier, Marie-Joanne Boucher and Noémie O’Farrell will be defending the lead roles in the new annual series, Witches, which will premiere on TVA next fall.
The three friends began to envision this project before the pandemic, not knowing through which medium it would be broadcast; theatre, cinema or television. It was Amalga’s producer André Dupuy who immediately saw the potential for a 26-episode annual series. Although TVA has not officially confirmed that “Sorcières” will move into the slot of “L’Échappée”, Monday at 8 p.m., according to information from the agency QMI, everything indicates that this will indeed be the case.
Filming on “Witches” – which of course doesn’t refer to witches on a broomstick but rather to “femininity, freedom and feminist issues” – begins next week, April 24th to be precise. The leads have “the luxury” of rehearsing for a while and taming their characters, something that’s pretty rare on television, Marie-Joanne Boucher told QMI Agency.
The veteran actress is more than happy to return to the small screen for a high-profile project that shone in ‘Virginie’ and ‘Providence.’ Since last year she can be seen in the comedy “Le bonheur”.
“It’s really the desire to work together that spawned this project,” she said, adding that she was “very close” in life to Celine Bonnier.
“The plots are layered, as are the characters. It’s hard to define the series. You can’t say it’s just drama because it also contains humor. We built it around people who want to dive into it week after week, and the show was designed to run over multiple seasons. There are flashbacks, secrets, investigations.
The series immerses viewers in the universe of three very different sisters who have one unvarying point in common. Joanne (Céline Bonnier), Élizabeth (Marie-Joanne Boucher) and Agnès (Noémie O’Farrell) grew up in a “sectarian commune” founded by their father in the 1980s to bury, each to take their own lives alone to lead own. One day, the police are called to their home village of Sainte-Piété, where they find a baby left to fend for itself. You then have only one chance, after 30 years of silence, to form a united front to find out who is behind this story.
“The commune broke up after a tragedy, as did the relationship between the sisters. In the series, we get closer to the strength of the community, of the family, because even when we move away, our past always catches up with us, positively or negatively,” says Ms. Boucher.
To give the republic to the three actors at the helm, “Sorcières” brings together Lamia Benhacine, Julianne Côté, Patrick Drolet, Alexa-Jeanne Dubé, Stéphane Gagnon, Rémi Goulet, Marie-Claude Guérin, Louise Laparé and Guillaume Laurin on screen , Elisabeth Locas, Denis Marchand, Christian Michaud, David Noël, Widemir Normil, Igor Ovadis, Christophe Payeur and Julie Roussel.
Celine Bonnier, Marie-Joanne Boucher and Noémie O’Farrell have enlisted the services of author Germain Larochelle to help their ideas flourish. The latter writes the plots, which take place in the present as in the past, three decades earlier, with Marie-Josée Ouellet and in collaboration with Marie-Chantal Bisson, Marie-Hélène Lapierre and David Leblanc. The production is signed by Myriam Verreault and Ian Lagarde.
- Produced by Amalga in association with Quebecor Content, “Sorcières” will air next September on TVA.