MONTREAL — Bell Media announced today the first drama series being produced for its French-language Noovo channel, called Virage, will premiere this fall.
Examining life after retirement from competitive sports, the series is inspired by the lives of a dozen Olympic and professional athletes, including Quebec speed skater Marianne St-Gelais (who is a content consultant on the project), and takes a look at our performance society, which too often takes us away from ourselves, says the Bell Media press release.
Produced by Montreal-based KOTV, Virage is written by Kim Lévesque-Lizotte (Les Simone) and Marie-Hélène Lebeau-Taschereau (Conseils de famille), with script support from Louis Morissette. The series stars Charlotte Aubin, Émile Schneider, Marie-Thérèse Fortin and Sylvain Marcel (pictured above, left to right). Catherine Therrien (Fourchette, District 31) is directing the series.
The drama follows the story of Frédérique Lessard (played by Aubin), three-time Olympic medallist in short track speed skating, who retires and decides at the same time to leave her spouse (Schneider) with whom she had planned to start a family, post-career. Faced with emptiness, she discovers life is not a race whose outcome you can control and she will have to learn to live without performing, says the press release.
“Even if this is not the story of her life, it was after a first collaboration with Marianne St-Gelais that the idea for the series came to us,” says Morissette, producer for KOTV, in an English translation of the release. “There is something fascinating and true about this little-known post-athletic world that is surprisingly part of the daily life of many people, regardless of field. We rarely bring to light this obligatory passage experienced by high-level competitors, which often turns into a quest for identity. Virage brings a different perspective and shows the other side of the coin of these years of hard work and depicts the collateral impacts on those around these medallists.”
“We are very happy with the arrival of Virage as the first drama for Noovo. This series, which has guts, fits perfectly with our vision for the channel, with its modern and unique, but above all, new subject,” says Sophie Parizeau, senior director, fiction and digital content for Bell Media. “I was seduced by this story which features these exceptional people who must learn to live differently, after having spent their lives striving for excellence. We are extremely proud to collaborate with KOTV for this major fiction, but also with a very feminine, young and daring creative team.”
For the French-language press release, please click here.
