Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century: Transcending the National 1802074767, 9781802074765

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Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century Transcending the National

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 95

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 81 Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948 82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century 83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé 84 Ari J. Blatt, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography 85 Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide 86 Jiewon Baek, Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy 87 Oana Panaïté, Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

88 Sonja Stojanovic, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French 89 Lucy Swanson, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction 90 Lucille Cairns, Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing 91 Sophie Fuggle, France’s Memorial Landscape: Views from Camp des Milles 92 Clíona Hensey, Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis 93 Christopher T. Bonner, Cold War Negritude: Form and Alignment in French Caribbean Writing 94 Akane Kawakami, Michael Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

M IC H A E L G OT T A N D T H I BAU T SC H I LT

Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century Transcending the National Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2024 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2024 Liverpool University Press Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt have asserted the right to be identified as the editors of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80207-476-5 eISBN 978-1-80207-515-1 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

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Acknowledgments Introduction Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt

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PART I: (Re)definitions 1 Drawing Outside the Lines: Re-bordering the World of Quebec Cinema Michael Gott (University of Cincinnati)

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2 Arnait Video Productions and the Fictional Work of the Inuit/Québécois Collective Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University)

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3 Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe: Women Auteurs on the International Film Festival Circuit Ylenia Olibet (McGill University)

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PART II: Trends and Genres 4 Around the Fire: Contemporary Québécois Cinema and the Endangered Forest Julie-Françoise Tolliver (University of Houston)

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5 “Buddies” to the Rescue: The Transnational Redefinition of Quebec Popular Cinema in the 21st Century Stéfany Boisvert (Université du Québec à Montréal)

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6 Genre Cinema and Colonialism: First Nations Meet Zombies 165 Bill Marshall (University of Stirling)

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PART III: Case Studies 7 Between Montreal and Los Angeles: Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in the Transnational Cinemas of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve Gemma King (The Australian National University) 8 Denis Côté on the Road from Radisson to Locarno Thibaut Schilt (College of the Holy Cross) 9 Impossible Queerness in Three Transnational Films by Xavier Dolan Mercédès Baillargeon (University of Massachusetts Lowell) 10 Exploring and Transcending Québécité in Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime and Monia Chokri’s La femme de mon frère Loïc Bourdeau (Maynooth University) and Peadar Kearney (Maynooth University)

187 209

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Interviews From Film School to the Big Screen: The “Quebec Label” in the 21st Century – An Interview with Denis Chouinard Michael Gott

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Transnationalism and the Québécois Film Industry: An Interview with Bachir Bensaddek Kirsten Smith

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An Interview with Marie-Hélène Cousineau on the Arnait Trilogy Karine Bertrand

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume as well as the editors with whom we worked at Liverpool University Press and who made this project possible, especially Chloe Johnson and Charles Forsdick. We thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their thorough feedback on the first draft of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Kirsten Smith, Bachir Bensaddek, Frédérick Pelletier, Denis Chouinard, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Karine Bertrand, and Rachel Rider. Michael Gott—I would like to thank the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, the Office of Research at the University of Cincinnati, and the Niehoff Center for Film and Media Studies for various grants that supported research and travel expenses and provided the opportunity to invite numerous directors from Quebec to engage with my students and answer my own questions in person and via Zoom. Those directors included Bachir Bensaddek, Sophie Deraspe, Ky Nam Le Duc, Jeanne Leblanc, Sarah Fortin, Frédérick Pelletier, and Myriam Verreault, all of whom have provided valuable insights into their own work and how it fits into the ecosystem of Quebec filmmaking. Thibaut Schilt—I thank the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the College of the Holy Cross, Susan Amatangelo, the Holy Cross Office of Sponsored Research, Stacy Riseman, Tsitsi Masvawure, and Amanda Luyster.

Introduction Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt Introduction

Why Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century? This collection focuses on the past two decades of Quebec cinema and takes an in-depth look at a (primarily) Montreal-based filmmaking industry whose increasingly diverse productions continue to resist the hegemony of Hollywood and to exist as a visible and successful hub of French-language—and ever more multilingual—cinema in North America. What is notable about Quebec cinema in the 21st century? The millennial parameters in this book’s title could be simply a convenient if somewhat arbitrary line of demarcation, for cultural productions do not always fit into the neat temporal categorizations that are popular in academic and scholarly work. However, since the turn of the millennium the Quebec film industry has changed dramatically in terms of the topics it addresses, its appeal to audiences beyond the province’s borders, the diversity of perspectives and background shown onscreen, and the talent behind the screen that make the films a reality. In the 21st century, Quebec cinema has become an ever more noticeable example of North American, (largely) French-language resistance to the hegemony of Hollywood (Jean, 2005, 11). Quebec cinema has “arrived” in the 21st century, as scholars have observed (Santoro et al., 2013, 157). Liz Czach points to several factors to support this assessment: Denys Arcand, who made his first film in 1962, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003 for Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions, 2003); Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010), Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2011), and Rebelle (War Witch, Kim Nguyen, 2012) garnering nominations for the same award in consecutive years between 2011 and 2013; directors such as Denis Côté, Xavier Dolan, and Rafaël Ouellet emerging on the prestigious European festival scene; a flourishing star system; and the proliferation of a more diverse range

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of genres (Czach, 2020, 41). To this list can be added the more recent success of women directors from Quebec outside of the province’s borders: Chloé Robichaud’s Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run) was selected for the “Un Certain Regard” lineup at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. Sophie Deraspe’s Antigone (2019) made a splash in Canada and beyond and won best Canadian feature at the Toronto International Film Festival and Canadian Screen Awards. Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s Une colonie (A Colony, 2018) won the Crystal Bear for Best Feature from the Berlin Film Festival’s Generation KPlus section. In 2019. Monia Chokri’s films La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love, 2019) and Simple comme Sylvain (The Nature of Love, 2023) were also selected for “Un Certain Regard,” with the former being recognized with the Jury’s Coup de cœur Award. Another film by Chokri, Babysitter (2022), premiered at Sundance. Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake (2022), a Canada-France coproduction shot in Quebec, debuted in the Director’s Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, had its Canadian premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, and received the Prix Louis-Delluc for Best First Film, the Canadian Screen Award for Best First Feature, a César Award nomination, and additional prizes in Deauville and Vancouver. The “arrival” of Quebec cinema near the turn of the 21st century has opened the door to a move in remarkable and diverse new directions.1 The three Quebec-produced films nominated for the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category in consecutive years between 2011 and 2013 are particularly noteworthy in relation to the themes of this volume. The narratives follow paths from Quebec to Lebanon (Incendies), tell the story of an Algerian asylum seeker in Montreal (Monsieur Lazhar), and recounts the lives of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Rebelle). The different/global orientations of these films mark a dramatic change in the outlook and interests of the industry in Quebec’s first major international success story, the aforementioned Les invasions barbares. Arcand’s film is arguably the “the greatest success of Québec cinema” when accounting for box office numbers and critical acclaim, and “undeniable evidence” of Quebec cinema’s maturity (Santoro et al., 2013, 157). 2 Arcand has since continued to produce films that get attention in the 21st century, most notably La chute de l’empire américain (The Fall of the American Empire, 2018), which closed the long-running trilogy that comprised Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986) and Les invasions barbares. Léa Pool, who directed her first feature

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film in 1980, is another notable example of a Quebec-based director who has continued to achieve success into the 21st century, with films such as Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s, 2008) and La passion d’Augustine (The Passion of Augustine, 2018), both of which are women-focused period pieces starring Céline Bonnier. The same remark could be made about Micheline Lanctôt, who made her screen debut as an actor in the early 1970s and went on to direct her first full-length film, L’homme à tout faire (The Handyman) in 1980. Since then, Lanctôt has pursued her work as a filmmaker in addition to acting, with numerous directing credits in the 2000s, including her latest feature, Une manière de vivre, released in 2019. Other notable Quebec-based filmmakers whose directing work straddles the 20th and the 21st centuries include Charles Binamé, Manon Briand, Bernard Émond, François Girard, Rodrigue Jean, and Jean-Marc Vallée (1963–2021). 3 This collection covers various elements noted by Czach (festivals, the star system in blockbusters, and horror films) and will focus in particular on certain aspects of this 21st-century picture that are the most novel within Quebec’s cinematic tradition. With this in mind, the “transcending” in our subtitle was a conscious choice to emphasize an active and ongoing process of transformation and negotiation that constantly explores, interrogates, problematizes, and expands the contours of the nation. We understand and engage with the act of transcending in relation to the nation of Quebec and the transnational processes and connections that inform its cinematic industry and infrastructure. This volume picks up where Bill Marshall’s 2001 Quebec National Cinema ends to investigate the inherently global orientation of Quebec’s film industry and cinematic output since the beginning of the new millennium. It is important to note that we are not tracing a movement from a national to a post- or transnational stage of Quebec cinema. As Andrew Higson has recently argued in the context of European cinemas, “the national has clearly by no means withered away in the era of globalization. Just as the national and nationalism have been re-asserted politically around the world, national cinemas still persist in various ways, even in the smallest nations” (2021, 199). Higson’s assessment was made with a particular eye on popular national cinema, defined as a “home-grown” success that does not travel well beyond the confines of the nation (2021, 206). That tendency is evident in Québécois “summer” blockbusters such as Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 (Érik Canuel, 2006; Alain Desrochers, 2017) and De père en flic and De père en flic 2 (Father and Guns and Father and Guns 2, Émile Gaudreault, 2009, 2017), which are discussed further by Stéfany Boisvert

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in Chapter 5. As Boisvert demonstrates, such films owe their success to a popular formula that combines transnational influences—notably Hollywood—with the reassuring presence of well-known and (locally) highly recognizable Québécois stars. A related impulse is evident in the heritage film, another strand of cinema that demonstrates the lingering appeal of Quebec national identity on screen. The success of heritage films such as Séraphin: un homme et son pêché (Séraphin: Heart of Stone, Charles Binamé, 2003), Aurore (Luc Dionne, 2005), and Le survenant (The Outlander, Canuel, 2005), are explained by their reaffirmation of a cohesive and homogenous national past amidst an ever more multicultural present (Czach, 2020, 42–47). The influence of a different strand of the national framework remains salient in many less commercial films, notably what has come to be known as the renouveau du cinéma québécois or Quebec New Wave, a trend that Canadian film commentators first identified in the mid-2000s. Across these varied strands, the national character of Quebec cinema is reinforced by the provincial funding mechanism supported by SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles) and the promotion of films locally and around the world by Québec Cinéma, which organizes the annual festivals Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma and Tournée Québec Cinéma. In this volume, we are particularly interested in the evident and growing tension between Quebec cinema as a “national cinema,” a phrase and concept that Marshall simultaneously embraces and problematizes (2001, 1–2), and as a cinema that reflects the transnationalism of today’s world and “a new form of fluidity of individual experiences” (Baillargeon and Bertrand, 2019, 137), both within and outside the borders of the province. Liz Czach and André Loiselle qualify contemporary Quebec cinema as “vibrant but deeply wistful” (2020, 1). Their recent collection, A Cinema of Pain: On Québec’s Nostalgic Screen (2020), identifies a widespread nostalgia in the province’s cinematic output in the wake of the second failed referendum on Quebec national sovereignty in 1995. Although they espouse a broadly conceived understanding of nostalgic cinema that shares the impulse for a “melancholy search for home” (2020, 2), this tendency still only accounts for a part of the province’s contemporary cinematic output. As director and filmmaking professor Denis Chouinard affirms in one of the three interviews included in this collection, many filmmakers—most notably but not exclusively those who came of age after 1995—have embraced a much broader approach to the definition of Québécois identity. The transnational optic—a focus on a diversity of origins, perspectives, and trajectories—remains

Introduction

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an underexplored angle from which to study Quebec cinema. With this book, we aim to pursue and expand upon the discussions begun in Mercédès Baillargeon and Karine Bertrand’s 2019 special issue of Contemporary French Civilization (44.2–3) on transnationalism in Quebec film and new media (both Baillargeon and Bertrand contribute to this volume). Notably, as they point out in their introduction, there are no essays in that 2019 issue that focus on representations of immigration and migration. This area deserves further critical interest and this collection includes three chapters that address representation of migration and immigration to different degrees, all positioned within a wider discussion of Quebec cinema that does not limit these discussions to a discursive space of “otherness” but insists on situating these themes and filmmakers of diverse origins firmly within the space of Quebec cinema. The burgeoning place of more diverse representations of immigrants and those with immigrant backgrounds in Quebec cinema since 2000 is also the focus of the interviews with Chouinard and Bachir Bensaddek that close this volume. By opting to think in terms of “transcending,” we would like to suggest that “transnational” approaches to film do not fully account for the ways that the national is enforced, updated, and repositioned in Quebec cinema.4 To transcend the national is to extend beyond national constraints and identifications while simultaneously reinforcing—or at least calling attention to—the national quality of the films, directors, funding and promotion infrastructures, and identity formulations. “Transcending the national” emphasizes a work in progress (as opposed to the more final “transnational”) and refers to a process that has accelerated since the beginning of this century, hence our decision to start there. Whereas “transnational” could be understood on a fundamental level as the sum of all intersections between the Quebec national and other nations, we also suggest that to transcend “the national” involves constantly rethinking the parameters of Quebec and its national cinema and indeed of Québécois identity itself. The Quebec national label, which posits an important distinction within the cinema of Canada, does not demarcate or advocate a monolithic national Québécois identity. Quebec’s contemporary film industry is the result of a layered mélange of intersecting and overlapping cultures. As Marshall notes in his Deleuzian reading of a multifarious “Québécois” identity, that nation is “always already pluralized, its bits, components, particles, and molecules arranged and organized according to bigger, molar, structures but at the same time potentially taking off in new directions”

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(2001, 11). Similarly, Denis Bachand contends that “infiltrated on all sides by transnational cultural trends, Québécois cinema is inscribed in a process of opening up to the Other which transforms it, all the while ensuring the development of its specificity” (2019, 164; our translation). The “national” in Quebec national cinema is unavoidable and important yet it is also complex, multifaceted, in transformation, and sometimes contradictory or at least conflicted in its elaboration. Transcending the National from within and beyond the Nation: Indigenous Films and Quebec Cinema One remarkable aspect of 21st-century Quebec cinema is the dramatic, though still arguably insufficient, increase in representation of Indigenous communities and films by Indigenous filmmakers.5 The presence of First Nations and Inuit characters on Quebec screens is not new and can be traced back to Catholic propaganda films made by French-Canadian filmmaker-priests in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, documentaries by cinéma direct directors that began to be produced in the 1960s, and a handful of late 20th-century fiction films that staged often problematic and stereotypical representations of the “Indigenous Other,” or “the one who was here before” Europeans colonized the North American continent (Marshall, 2001, 242). The presence of Indigenous subjects in films from Quebec has historically been primarily relegated to documentary. The few examples of fiction films from the past century with notable, but not necessarily sympathetic, Indigenous characters include Fernand Dansereau’s Astataïon ou Le festin des morts (Mission of Fear, 1965), Georges Dufaux and Clément Perron’s C’est pas la faute à Jacques Cartier (It Isn’t Jacques Cartier’s Fault, 1968), Gilles Carle’s Red (1969), and Claude Gagnon’s Visage pâle (1985). Examples from this century include Michel Poulette’s Maïna (2013), Robert Morin’s 3 histoires d’Indiens (2014), Benoit Pilon’s Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life, 2008) and Iqaluit (2016), Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (Before the Streets, 2016), François Girard’s Hochelaga, terre des âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls, 2017), Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s Une colonie (A Colony, 2018; see Chapter 1), Myriam Verreault’s Kuessipan (2019), and Sarah Fortin’s Nouveau-Québec (2021). Until recently, the majority of these films were directed by white Québécois men, with the notable exception of the Montreal-based Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, who has dedicated her now

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fifty-plus-year career to activist documentaries denouncing the plight and celebrating the dignity of various Indigenous communities. However, as Karine Bertrand has pointed out, radical changes in Quebec’s late 20th-century society, including the Oka Crisis (or Kanesatake Resistance) of 1990, the failed referendum for independence of 1995, a renewed resolve to recognize Indigenous rights, and the increasing multiculturalism of the province, have paved the way for the emergence of documentaries intent on describing newly formed relationships between Québécois and First Nations and Inuit peoples (2019, 225), as well as fiction films determined to give a more authentic and unmediated voice to Indigenous subjects. As Bertrand notes in Chapter 2 of this volume, Indigenous cinema is sometimes overlooked in discussions of Quebec cinema in a transnational context. She also reminds us that Quebec filmmakers have only relatively recently chosen to feature Indigenous cultures and identities in their films and allowed themselves to be influenced by the diverse cultures and storytelling traditions of some of the eleven First Nations of Quebec, as well as the Inuit of Nunavik and Nunavut. On one level, films by either Indigenous or settler filmmakers featuring Indigenous protagonists are examples of intercultural “encounters,” as Bertrand labels the process behind the making of Avant les rues, produced in consultation with the Elders of the Atikamekw community it depicts, and Kuessipan, cowritten by Innu author Naomi Fontaine, who also penned the source novel of the same name. It should be noted that while these films do feature productive intercultural interactions between settler colonial and Indigenous subjects in Quebec, they are only glimpses into a much more complex reality on the ground that continues to be marked, in Julie Burelle’s words, by a “colonial present tense” and a “tense colonial present” (2019, 4). Although the representation of stories about and involving Indigenous peoples is expanding in Quebec, still relatively few feature films have been produced by Indigenous filmmakers. The list so far comprises Yves Sioui Durand’s Mesnak (2011), Jeff Barnaby (1976–2022)’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and Blood Quantum (2019), Sonia Bonspille Boileau’s Le dep (2015) and Rustic Oracle (2019), Tracy Deer’s Beans (2020), and Caroline Monnet’s Bootlegger (2021). Several chapters in this volume include discussions of films about Indigenous identity, and we believe that a collection on Quebec cinema must include this important and growing body of work. ​​Indigenous subjects inhabited Turtle Island long before the arrival of European colonizers. Likewise, the physical boundaries of today’s Quebec province that were established

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by colonizers are arbitrary and do not neatly align with or circumscribe the spaces of Indigenous communities. Films by Indigenous filmmakers therefore exist both within and beyond the current borders of Quebec. However, they are often funded by the province, usually involve cast and crew members of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds, and should be considered in relation to the also growing body of work by ethnic European directors who are examining the implications of colonialism on the soil they inhabit. An example of the latter category is the low-budget, multilingual (English, French, Cree) political satire Québexit (Joshua Demers, 2020), which takes place on a small road at the Quebec-New Brunswick border after a successful third Quebec sovereignty referendum, and cleverly features two Indigenous women characters who frequently traverse the border and insist that newly established crossing restrictions do not apply to them. In a more commercial vein, the aforementioned Hochelaga, terre des âmes, which received several Genie and Iris awards, ambitiously recounts key moments in the history of Montreal from the 13th century to the present in 100 minutes, features hundreds of Indigenous actors (several as speaking characters, and many as extras), and includes dialogues in Mohawk, French, English, Arabic, Latin, and Ojibwe. Another film noted already, Nouveau-Québec, stages a story of family culpability and reconciliation in the remote mining town of Schefferville. In doing so, it explores the possibility of more widespread social and structural reconciliation and redress of the continuing exploitation of First Nations communities (in this case Innu and Naskapi) and the environment (see, in addition to Bertrand’s Chapter 2, Bill Marshall’s Chapter 6 for a continuing discussion of Indigenous cinema’s complex positioning within Canadian and Quebec filmmaking). The links between Quebec and the world of Inuit cinema add yet another layer of complexity to the transnational context of Quebec cinema. Igloolik, Nunavut has become a hub of Inuit cinema and “the Arctic film capital of the world” as Mackenzie and Stenport put it (2019, 137). Despite that orientation from beyond Quebec towards other directions of the Indigenous world and the Arctic, Quebec is also home to an Inuit population in Nunavik and the success of Inuit cinema in coproduction with Quebec has led to the suggestion that it be classified as a third Canadian national cinema after Canadian and Québécois or that Canadian cinema constitutes a “trilingual national cinema” (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2019, 126). Madeline Ivalu, an Inuk filmmaker from Nunavut, has codirected three features with

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Quebec-born director Marie-Hélène Cousineau: Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain, 2008), Uvanga (2013), and Restless River (La rivière sans repos, 2019). Ivalu and Cousineau are two of the cofounders of the Igloolik-based Arnait Video Productions, a collective established in 1991 with the goal of empowering Inuit women to tell stories using screen media (Arnait is discussed in detail by Karine Bertrand in Chapter 2 and in the interview with Cousineau at the end of this volume, and Chapter 1 discusses Uvanga in relation to Quebec’s cinematic and ideational borders). Another significant contribution to the promotion of Indigenous representation onscreen has been made by Wapikoni Mobile, a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 by director Manon Barbeau in collaboration with the Montreal-based National Film Board (NFB, known as Office National du film or ONF in French) and l’Assemblée des Premières Nations du Québec et du Labrador. Wapikoni has produced more than 300 shorts that have circulated around the world at festivals and through other initiatives and collaborations. The initiative pairs established Québécois film talent with youth in Indigenous communities (for thirty-day “tours”) to create films that tell stories about Indigenous life and challenge prevalent stereotypes about Indigenous people (see, for instance, Deux Pocahontas en ville by Jemmy Echaquan Dubé and Marie-Édith Fontaine, from 2015). These encounters have inspired stories that became films by settler Québécois directors who worked on the Wapikoni Mobile project such as Avant les rues, Une colonie, and Nouveau-Québec. These films—whether made by Indigenous or settler directors in cooperative encounters with Indigenous communities within the Quebec cinema infrastructure—offer examples of some of the key ways that the national is being actively transcended. Indigenous films transcend the territorial, cultural, and linguistic parameters of the Quebec national. Indigenous spaces do not map seamlessly within the lines drawn by settlers. This is evident in works of the aforementioned Arnait film collective and the Indigenous-controlled Tshiuetin railway (which starts and ends in Quebec but passes through anglophone Labrador) that features prominently in Kuessipan and NouveauQuébec (and transported the crew of the latter to filming locations in Schefferville) and is the subject of Caroline Monnet’s 2016 documentary short Tshiuetin. One notable way that Indigenous films problematize the parameters of Quebec national cinema is through their linguistic diversity. The dialogue in Avant les rues is primarily in Atikamekw. Both Kuessipan and Nouveau-Québec incorporate some conversations

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in Innu-aimun, situated in the latter film to provide opacity in key scenes in which the white Québécois protagonists are kept in the dark because they do not understand the language. Bootlegger has dialogue in French and Anishinaabemowin, Iqaluit switches between French, English, and Inuktituk, and Angelique’s Isle (2018), codirected by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Ontario-based Anishinaabe filmmaker Michelle Derosier, mixes dialogue in English and Anishinaabemowin. Some recent films by Quebec-based Indigenous directors are primarily in English, notably Blood Quantum (see Chapter 6), Beans, and Rustic Oracle. The film that perhaps epitomizes most strikingly the complexity of contemporary Indigenous cinema and its relationship with both Quebec and the wider world is the Arnait-produced fantasy film Tia and Piujuq (2018), directed by (and also featuring) the Inuk filmmaker Lucy Tulugarjuk, and cowritten by Marie-Hélène Cousineau. Through the story of a special friendship between two girls from different parts of the world (Nunavut and the Middle East), this film combines Indigenous (Inuit), Québécois, and immigrant (Syrian refugee) stories into one film, was shot in both Igloolik and Montreal, and features dialogue in French, English, Inuktitut, and Arabic. Cinéma-monde and Quebec Cinema: Encounters within and beyond the National Such Indigenous films are particularly apt examples of the complicated and blurry lines that we must flexibly sketch around the Quebec “national” category. However, the overlapping and diverging threads of Indigenous cinemas with Quebec’s film industry and infrastructure are just part of the 21st-century picture of Quebec cinema. This expansion and diversification of Quebec’s cinematic horizons encompasses not only a geographic and thematic expansion but also a growing number of films that include multilingual dialogues or that are not in French at all. This includes most prominently Arabic and Spanish, but also Mandarin and Vietnamese and as previously noted Atikamekw, Innu-aimun, and Inuktituk among others. With the previously cited complex and contested notions of the Quebec national in mind, it is particularly notable that the province’s cinema has become more linguistically diverse during a period of rising social and political debate about reinforcing the status of French in the province. The loi 96 was passed in 2022 to update some provisions in the 1977 Charte sur la langue française (loi 101) and Prime Minister

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François Legault had proposed more extensive measures to expand the use of French in businesses, set standards of French proficiency in anglophone schools, promote French as the “language of integration” for immigrants in the province, establish a Ministry of French Language, and to amend the Canadian constitution to explicitly state that “Les Québécoises et les Québécois forment une nation” [Québécois men and women together form a nation] and that “Le français est la seule langue officielle du Québec. Il est aussi la langue commune de la nation québécoise” [French is Quebec’s only official language. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation] (Bélair-Cirino, 2022). While it is beyond our scope to discuss the intricacies of provincial funding, there is a certain misalignment between how the case for funding SODEC is often framed, as a cultural and linguistic bulwark to protect Québécois identity, and the relatively linguistically diverse projects that receive funding. The diversity of Quebec cinema is evident in its multilingualism and the diversity of routes to and from the postcolonial francosphere. This collection aims to assess Quebec cinema’s representation of, and evolving relationship to, the world both within and beyond the borders of the province from a variety of perspectives. It is an endeavor that aligns closely with conceptual approaches to cinéma-monde that have been developed in recent scholarship on the cinema of the zones that are best (and flexibly) delineated as the “francosphere” (Marshall, 2012; Gott and Schilt, 2018; Gott, 2022). Quebec cinema is an archetypal “contact zone” within the contours of cinéma-monde, a category that is sometimes contiguous with yet broader and more flexible than “francophone cinema” and which aims to decenter discourses on global filmmaking in French and beyond (Gott and Schilt, 2018, 8–9). The term “francophone” by definition also does not adequately account for connections to and implications for the francosphere that are frequently contained in films that are not primarily francophone or, in numerous cases, barely contain French (Marshall, 2019, 261). To think in terms of cinéma-monde often involves approaching films in a literal and symbolic “post-francophone” framework (Gott, 2022, 5). “Post” both signifies linguistic diversity and a focus on connections that extend beyond traditional maps of the francophone world and typical postcolonial alignments. Quebec cinema is, as Bill Marshall contends, in itself a microcosm of “global cinema” (Marshall, 2019). Quebec is both a key node in a decentered network of cinéma-monde and in many ways a microcosm of the cinéma-monde concept.

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Intended to promote decentered, “accented” (Naficy, 2001), and ethically focused approaches to studying film industries and infrastructures and films and the productive encounters they may generate (Gott and Schilt, 2018), cinéma-monde represents a global cinematic interface with multiple hubs. Thinking in terms of cinéma-monde involves looking beyond the “centers” of global cinema production without neglecting the inherent unevenness of relations between economic and cultural centers and putative peripheries (Gott, 2022, 2). This is achieved by focusing on four key elements: borders, movement, language, and lateral connections (Marshall, 2012, 42). While Montreal is the evident hub of Quebec cinema, the industry orbits around multiple poles of identification that fund, produce, and distribute its output. In many ways, 21st-century Quebec cinema also exemplifies the “gestures of solidarity, ethics, or interest in others” (Gott and Schilt, 2018, 10) that are the focus of many academic approaches to cinéma-monde. While the cinematic production of Quebec, with 8.5 million inhabitants and sixty-seven feature-length films produced in 2019, certainly does not put it in serious competition with France as a center for world cinema, the global entanglements of its film industry and the internal diversity of the province add several layers of complexity to the cinémamonde discussion. Cinéma-monde is very much concerned with putting “the accent back” in French-language cinema (Marshall, 2012, 45). Quebec cinema does this by serving as an alternative hub (to Paris) for francophone and multilingual cinema. It also forges alternative, “lateral” connections within the francosphere and beyond that often bypass France. With his film Congorama (2006, a Canada/Belgium/ France coproduction) Québécois director Philippe Falardeau (who is discussed in Chapter 1) tells a story that links Canada to Belgium and its colonial past in the Congo. Falardeau describes bypassing France as a political cinematic statement that is in part a reaction to what he perceives as the linguistic intolerance of the French film industry (Gott and Schilt, 2018, 7–8). In the 21st century, Quebec’s cinema has become increasingly global in its orientation and more open to representing the diversity of routes towards Quebec that frequently but not exclusively bring immigrants from the francosphere. Denis Chouinard’s L’ange de goudron (Tar Angel, 2001), which tells the story of a family of Algerian immigrants in Quebec, marked a significant milestone in this regard.6 We included an interview with Chouinard in this collection because L’ange de goudron and Chouinard’s debut feature Clandestins (Stowaways, 1997,

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codirected with Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff), which follows the ill-fated voyage in a container ship crossing the Atlantic towards Canada made by a group of refugees from Eastern Europe and the Maghreb, are both important examples of a turn towards more diverse subjects in Quebec cinema. Following L’ange de goudron, a chronological list of films focused on global mobilities, encounters, or the experiences of migrants and immigrants includes Littoral (Tideline, Wajdi Mouawad, 2004), De ma fenêtre, sans maison … (From My Window, Without a Home …, Maryanne Zéhil, 2006), Congorama (2006), Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives, Denis Côté, 2007), Incendies (2010), Monsieur Lazhar (2011), Boucherie halal (Babek Aliassa, 2012), Exil (CharlesOlivier Michaud, 2012), Inch’Allah (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, 2012), Rebelle (2012), Roméo onze (Ivan Grbovic, 2012), La vallée des larmes (The Valley of Tears, Maryanne Zéhil, 2012), Arwad (Dominique Chila and Samer Najari, 2013), Diego Star (Frédérick Pelletier, 2013), La ferme des humains (Onur Karaman, 2014), Là où Atilla passe… (Onur Karaman, 2015), L’autre côté de novembre (The Other Side of November, Maryanne Zéhil, 2016), Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City, Bachir Bensaddek, 2016), Oscillations (Ky Nam Le Duc, 2017), Un printemps d’ailleurs (A Touch of Spring, Xiaodan He, 2017), Les routes en février (Roads in February, Katherine Jerkovic, 2018), Antigone (Sophie Deraspe, 2019), La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love, Monia Chokri, 2019), Le meilleur pays du monde (The Greatest Country in the World, Ky Nam Le Duc, 2019), La face cachée du baklava (The Sticky Side of Baklava, Maryanne Zéhil, 2020), Les oiseaux ivres (Drunken Birds, Ivan Grbovic, 2021), Sin La Habana (Kaveh Nabatian, 2021), Le coyote (Katherine Jerkovic, 2022), and Montréal Girls (Patricia Chica, 2022). These films recount a diverse array of stories that link Quebec to Algeria, Bulgaria, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Haiti, the Ivory Coast, Vietnam, Turkey, and various places in Latin America. Many contain significant dialogue in Arabic (including Arwad, L’autre côté de novembre, Montréal la blanche, Montréal Girls), Spanish (including Les routes en février, Sin La Habana, Le coyote, Les oiseaux ivres), and numerous other languages. As both the list of films focused on immigrants and global connections and the preceding discussion of films about Indigenous people demonstrate, the second decade of the 21st century has seen a significant increase in the number of films that approach a more diverse and multicultural side of contemporary Quebec and indeed the world beyond.7

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Positioning Films from Quebec: Funding, Distribution, and Production The following chapters will engage with the complexity of 21st-century Quebec cinema in different ways by analyzing film texts or contexts (or both). Although the aims of this book do not include providing a detailed account of how the funding structure and production ecosystem operate in Quebec, in this section we will survey some of the key components of the production and distribution of Quebec cinema. With an annual budget soon likely to reach over 200 million CAD, a large part of which is invested in the audiovisual sector, SODEC is unquestionably the most important factor in the production of Quebec cinema. Virtually all of the films covered in this book benefited from grants from SODEC’s film production support funding scheme (“Aide à la production”), which primarily funds feature-length fiction filmmaking but also has award categories for documentary and short films. The funding initiative has both cultural and economic aims. Chief among them are to promote “the production of quality projects that are original, engaging, represent diverse genres, and that have the potential to circulate in or beyond Quebec” and “the emergence of new talents in the audiovisual industry” (SODEC). Central to the latter endeavor is SODEC’s initiative to reach parity in funding between films directed by men and women through a “1+1” approach launched in 2017 that allowed producers to request funding for two projects provided that one was directed by a women (see Chapter 3). According to Réalisatices Équitables, a nonprofit association launched in 2007 to promote equity for women directors, SODEC reached 50-50 parity in funding amounts in the 2020–2021 cycle.8 SODEC is also charged with negotiating film coproduction agreements and sponsors globally oriented initiatives such as the SODEC_LAB at the Europe-Latin American Coproduction Forum, which aims to foster cinematic collaborations between Quebec, Europe, and Latin America. The vast majority of film projects that receive funding in Quebec are made by a production house based in Montreal. The most notable film production houses fall into five main categories. Voyelles Films (established in 2010) and Colonelles Films (2014) focus on innovative projects—including features, shorts, and music videos—by emerging talents. Colonelles was founded by three women, including Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, whose 2019 film Une colonie is discussed in detail in Chapter 1. Founded in 2002 and 2003, respectively, Micro_scope and Metafilms are more established and work in similar auteur film

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terrain, but with a wider reach. Micro_scope produced Villeneuve’s Incendies, Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, and more recently Grbovic’s Les oiseaux ivres. Metafilms has produced films by Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, and Denis Côté. Item7 represents a third category that is germane to this book. Founded in 2009, the company has specialized in auteur films with generally larger budgets and aspirations, including Vallée’s Café de Flore (2011), Nguyen’s Rebelle (2012), and Robichaud’s Pays (2016; see Chapter 1). They are also responsible for global productions in English by Nguyen (The Hummingbird Project, 2018) and John Crowley (Brooklyn, 2015) as well as significantly more commercial fare such as the summer blockbuster Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2. A final category of production company includes those like Caramel Films, Cinémaginaire, and Sphere Media, which focus more on larger-budget productions and genre films. Cinémaginaire has produced some of the most successful films from Quebec, including Émile Gaudreault’s De père en flic, and De père en flic 2, and Menteur (Compulsive Liar, 2019), as well as Arcand’s La chute de l’empire américain. Caramel Films’ most notable productions include Paul à Québec (François Bouvier, 2015) and Ken Scott’s Starbuck (2011, a French-language production) and Delivery Man (2013, a US/Canada/ India production with dialogue in English and featuring numerous well-known Hollywood actors). Sphere Media has produced numerous comedies and horror films and also does animation, unscripted TV, and series. Finally, two production cooperatives also merit mention here. The Association coopérative de productions audio-visuelles (ACPAV) is notable for its production support of auteur cinema with an explicitly stated emphasis on sociopolitical framing. Unlike the companies noted above, which all began producing films in the 21st century, the ACPAV has been in the business for more than fifty years. Its roster of films includes Pierre Falardeau’s Elvis Graton trilogy (1981–1985), Bernard Émond’s 20h17 rue Darling (2003), and more recently Deraspe’s Antigone and Sébastien Pilote’s La disparition des lucioles (The Fireflies Are Gone, 2018). Spira, another cooperative based in Quebec City, endeavors to serve as a hub for independent filmmaking outside of the province’s principal industry hub in Montreal. Spira was formed in 2015 when Spirafilm joined forces with the Vidéo Femmes organization, which was founded in 1973. In addition to production support, equipment rental, and training, Spira distributes a large catalog of primarily shorts and documentary films.9

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Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

The following examples of specific films and their funding and distribution trajectories before and after release demonstrate the complexity and potential contradiction inherent in Quebec national cinema. Far from being a shortcoming, the contradictions are part of the possibility of Quebec cinema as an increasingly diverse, multifaceted microcosm for cinéma-monde and the potential for fortuitous connectivity that breaks existing conceptions and narratives about identity. Mohawk-Québécois director Sonia Bonspille Boileau’s Rustic Oracle (whose French title is Vivaces), made with a mostly Indigenous (primarily Mohawk) cast, offers one example of how a film may generate meaningful encounters on and off screen and also enable viewers to “look across borders” (Gott, 2022) within and beyond Canada in its circulation and programming afterlife. Rustic Oracle, which is mostly in English (the language typically spoken by members of the Mohawk Nation in Kanesatake, where the film is partially set) is a much more ambitious project than Boileau’s 2015 French-language début Le dep (which featured mostly Innu actors), and was made with a significantly bigger budget, thanks in part to the Women in the Director’s Chair Feature Film Award that the director received in 2017. Rustic Oracle is an exploration of the complex crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, an ongoing tragedy in Canada that was the subject of Kim O’Bomsawin’s documentary Quiet Killing (Ce silence qui tue) in 2018, which provides the statistic that an Indigenous woman living in Canada is eight times more likely to be murdered than any other Canadian citizen. Set in the late 1990s, before social media, Rustic Oracle is told exclusively from the point of view of Ivy (Lake Delisle), an eight-year-old girl determined to find her big sister Heather (McKenzie Deer Robinson), who has vanished from their small Mohawk community. With minimal clues and no help from local authorities, Ivy and her working-class single mother Susan (played by Carmen Moore, a British Columbia-born actress of mixed Wet’suwet’en and Scots/Irish ancestry) embark on a potentially perilous journey to find Heather, first to Montreal, then to Val d’or and finally to Ottawa. It is at this point that the film turns into a road movie, with some tropes familiar to a genre that occupies a prevalent place in Quebec cinema (as we will discuss below). Though the mother–daughter traveling pair continues to deal with the utter passivity of the police, all of whom are played by white Québécois men (including Kevin Parent and Richard Jutras), they find assistance among other (minority) women: Tota (Margo Kane), Susan’s mother, who helps financially; Renée (Melissa Toussaint), a black woman from

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Montreal who runs a center for missing women; Karen (Alex Rice), an Indigenous woman who works in a community center in Val d’or; and Susan’s childhood friend Hawi (Brittany LeBorgne), who lives in Ottawa. Though Heather is not found, Susan manages to save four Indigenous girls from human trafficking as a result of her unofficial investigation. The film ends as it began, in the present day, with a grown-up Ivy (played by Mohawk actress Devery Jacobs, who also appears in films by Mi’kmaq director Jeff Barnaby) speaking in voice-over to her own eightyear-old daughter about her family’s history. The narrative trajectory of Rustic Oracle suggests that meaningful encounters can be made across communities. Boileau’s feature, which begins and ends in the Mohawk community of Kanesatake (where Boileau’s mother still lives), also complements Julie Burelle’s analysis of “cinematic encounters on the reserve,” in which the author discusses two films from the Wapikoni Mobile project as well as Mesnak and Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (her best-known documentary from 1993, about a land dispute between the Mohawk people and the Quebec town of Oka) as narratives that “illuminate what happens when the settler state is confronted with the refusal of Indigenous people to quietly disappear” (Burelle, 2019, 113). As a circulating film, Rustic Oracle was encountered by audiences in a certain sphere as a film from Quebec, notably at the annual Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, and as a Canadian film in others, notably through its promotion and programming by the National Day of Canadian Cinema but also through a wider geographic distribution within Canada than many films from Quebec enjoy. Rustic Oracle also circulated in continental and global Indigenous spheres, for instance through its appearance at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco. Although its English-language dialogue afforded Rustic Oracle a relatively wide audience, Canadian-oriented aspects of the film’s funding and distribution are typical in Quebec cinema. Like most Quebec films, it received funding from Telefilm Canada in addition to provincial SODEC funding. It was also among a select group to receive support from CBC Films. Therefore it contains overlapping national affiliations, each with a different “identity” that the film bears, as well as a unique logic and political-social impetus behind its funding scheme. CBC Films’s stated goal “to encourage meaningful and contemporary stories that represent Canada” is neither entirely aligned nor incompatible with the aims of SODEC, while their initial criteria for funding of prioritizing onscreen representation also differs

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Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

from but shares similar goals with provincial policy to achieve “parity” in filmmaking talent (Bourgault-Côté, 2019). As viewing objects that circulate among audiences, Quebec and Canadian film designations also overlap, adding another layer to the complexity of Quebec “national” cinema. Films from Quebec compete with other Quebec national productions for the Prix Iris (formerly Prix Jutra) and as Canadian productions for the Canadian Screen Awards (formerly Genie Awards). Select Quebec productions might also premier at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) or feature in TIFF’s influential Canada’s Top Ten List. One recent film that did both was Les oiseaux ivres. With dialogue in four languages (French, Spanish, English, and Mandarin) and a plot dealing with global migration and exploitation, Les oiseaux ivres was primed to reach a wider audience. Other directors have followed—to different degrees—a trajectory towards a broader global audience with films and series produced in English. The examples of Denis Villeneuve and Jean-Marc Vallée (see Chapter 7) are well known, but Kim Nguyen and Philippe Falardeau have also moved into regularly making English-language productions. Nguyen’s Canadian productions and coproductions Eye on Juliette (2017) and The Hummingbird Project (2018) are notable here, as are Falardeau’s Chuck (2018, United States), My Salinger Year (2020, Canada), and The Good Lie (2014, Kenya/India/United States/Canada/South Africa). While Falardeau (who is discussed in more detail in Chapter 1) has moved back and forth between Quebec-produced French-language films and series and English-language films, Nguyen has been exclusively working in English-language film and series. The cinéma-monde approach offers a suitably broad and flexible framework through which to consider these varied trajectories and orientations. Films from Quebec have been particularly successful at the Canadian Screen Awards. Seven films from Quebec have won the “Best Motion Picture” award over the past ten years: Rebelle, Gabrielle (Louise Archambault, 2013), Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014), Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World, Xavier Dolan, 2016), Une colonie, Antigone, and Beans. The “New Territories” and Well-Trodden Terrains of Quebec Cinema In 2019 the Montreal-based film magazine 24 Images devoted a special issue to “les nouveaux territoires du cinéma québécois.” In it, Bruno

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Dequen noted the continued importance of territory for Quebec cinema but also the new directions and perspectives it has taken on in the 2010s. The issue features an article about the artist-owned Isuma collective, with offices in Igloolik, Nunavut, and Montreal, interviews with directors Caroline Monnet (who is both French and Anishinaabe) and Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, and a listing of sixty-five films that they characterize as representatives of the “new” territories of the province’s cinema industry. Several notable new “territories” of 21st-century Quebec cinema can be observed. As we mentioned already, Quebec is a multilayered “contact zone” that is a key part of the global francosphere yet also simultaneously interconnected with various other cultural and linguistic zones. This has resulted in increasingly common excursions into new geographic spaces that are often but not exclusively linked to the diversity brought to the province by recent immigration. There is also an increased emphasis on exploring Quebec’s internal diversity through stories about—and often made with varied degrees of participation by—the Indigenous peoples whose presence predates the arrival of Europeans. Films such as Kuessipan and Nouveau-Québec focus on territories that are not new for Quebec cinema but are now being approached in different ways. Lastly, even while the influence of the cinéma direct tradition remains evident, the new stylistic terrain of the renouveau trend has been one of the most important and notable aspects of Quebec cinema since the turn of the millennium. One fascinating element of the 21st-century cinema of Quebec is how the traditional terrains are being remade. This encompasses literal terrains in the form of typical landscapes—snowy fields and streets, vast forests, and vistas over the Saint Lawrence—that are repopulated in 21st-century films with more diverse casts of people and reframed in new stories. These territories were explored most notably onscreen by cinéma direct, a seminal documentary (and occasionally fictional) cinematic trend that revolutionized the Quebec film industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and whose influence is still palpable today in both the documentary and fictional work of contemporary directors; including in the films of Denis Côté, discussed in Chapter 8. This tradition developed as a group of generally untrained filmmakers, among them Gilles Groulx, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, and Arthur Lamothe, who “attempted to restore an accurate image of the Québécois people, that is, an image that is not distorted by the eye of the ‘other’” (Marsolais, 2011, 11). With precursors in the silent cinema of Robert Flaherty and Dziga

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Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

Vertov and parallel traditions in the United States’s Direct Cinema and France’s cinéma vérité, these Québécois filmmakers used lightweight cameras and direct sound to film their subjects in their “natural” context, with as much precision, and as unmediated as possible. This often involved traveling to remote, rural locations to shoot. Two notable examples are Lamothe’s Bûcherons de la Manouane (1962), a raw account of lumberjacks working in the Lanaudière region, and Perrault and Brault’s Pour la suite du monde (Of Whales, the Moon and Men, 1965), in which locals revive the ancestral tradition of beluga fishing on the Île-aux-Coudres, an island in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River. Cinéma direct films also “echo the awakening of Quebec society” (Jean, 2005, 45) that occurred during the Quiet Revolution and record the province’s shifting identity and growing sense of national belonging; most notably in Perrault’s Un pays sans bon sens! (Wake Up, Mes Bons Amis!, 1970), which in addition to interviewing French Canadians about their sense of identity, turned its attention to Indigenous subjects in Quebec and Bretons in France. Some of these filmmakers repeatedly turned their cameras to members of Quebec’s First Nations, one of the most ambitious projects being Lamothe’s thirteen-film series Chronique des Indiens du nord-est du Québec (1974–1983). As previously stated, documentaries by Alanis Obomsawin, who directed her first film in 1971 and her most recent one in 2022, were exceptional at the time for being directed by an Indigenous woman. We have already noted that Indigenous stories have continued to fill Quebec screens in the 21st century, and that also includes documentaries made by both Québécois and Indigenous filmmakers and a higher percentage of women; see for example Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins’s documentary short Rencontre (Encounter, 2011) and feature documentary Québékoisie (2014), two accounts of the complex relationships between settler and Indigenous subjects in Quebec; Elisapie Isaac’s autobiographical documentary short Si le temps le permet (If the Weather Permits, 2003), which explores the Inuk side of the singerdirector’s identity; the road documentary Traversées (Passages, Caroline Côté and Florence Pelletier, 2020), which chronicles the grueling yet cathartic expedition of a small group of settler Québécois and Indigenous women following the Koroc river in Nunavik; and all the films by Abenaki documentarist Kim O’Bomsawin, including Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human, 2020) about the Innu poet Joséphine Bacon. Analyzed within this context, fiction films from L’ange de goudron, which includes a scene from Michel Brault’s 1967 Entre la mer et

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l’eau douce (Between Sweet and Salt Water) to Le meilleur pays du monde pursue the cinéma direct tradition of situating subjects (whether Québécois or Indigenous) within Quebec’s landscape but redefine its population by placing immigrants of various generations within their bountifully snow-filled frames, with the “new” Québécois marking their own new lines on the terrain as a cinematic palimpsest. In the process they interrogate and expand the concept of Quebecness while keeping the past clearly in view. This is not so much a new terrain as remaking the historical terrain of Quebec cinema in a new way. Another well-trodden terrain of Quebec cinema that has seen a diverse update in the 21st century is the road movie. Travel narratives have a relatively long history in the province but road movies have become increasingly prevalent since 2000 because they offer an ideal format through which to engage with old and new terrain and undertake an exploration of the changing spaces and relationships of Quebec cinema. As previously argued elsewhere, Quebec’s majestic wide open terrains, its famous harsh, snowy winters, and the ubiquitous presence of the Saint Lawrence River in the life of its inhabitants make for propitious and cinegenic opportunities to explore mobility within the region and, increasingly, beyond (Schilt, 2018, 194). Contemporary Quebec road cinema has two notable cultural antecedents. One is Jacques Poulin’s 1984 Kerouac-esque road novel Volkswagen Blues, which chronicles the transformative journey from Gaspé to San Francisco of a white FrenchCanadian man and a young Métis woman. Going back further, the second is the cinema of the 1960s. This includes both the cinéma direct documentaries of that decade and Le chat dans le sac (Cat in the Sack, 1964), the first fiction film by Gilles Groulx. Le chat dans le sac cultivates the myth of nonurban, northern Quebec as a captivating land still partially unexplored and gave early cinematic expression to the idea that Québécois identity is somehow linked to a personal exploration of the territories that constitute the province (and, occasionally, the country at large), including those far away from the more populated south. This idea has become common in Quebec cinema, particularly in films featuring a road component (Schilt, 2018, 196). Examples from the 21st century include the aforementioned L’ange de goudron, Congorama, Iqaluit, and Nouveau-Québec, as well as Yellowknife (Rodrigue Jean, 2002), Les états nordiques (Drifting States, Denis Côté, 2005), New Denmark (Rafaël Ouellet, 2009), La donation (Bernard Émond, 2009), 2 frogs dans l’ouest (2 Frogs in the West, Dany Papineau, 2010), Route 132 (Louis Bélanger, 2010), En terrains connus (Familiar Grounds, Stéphane Lafleur, 2011), Camion (Rafaël Ouellet,

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2012), Une jeune fille (Catherine Martin, 2013), Les loups (The Wolves, Sophie Deraspe, 2014), Les barbares de la Malbaie (Vincent Biron, 2019), and to a lesser extent Québec-Montréal (Ricardo Trogi, 2002) and La chasse au Godard d’Abbittibbi (Éric Morin, 2013). Les routes en février, a TIFF Canada’s Top Ten selection in 2018, represents a notable example of the expanded geographic horizons of Quebec cinema because its road itinerary involves an exploration of family history and personal identity in Uruguay. Occasionally, “the road” is more local and explores the urban streets (and diverse inhabitants) of Montreal, as it did in La vie heureuse de Léopold Z (Gilles Carle, 1968) but from the “new” point of view of an immigrant subject, such as the Algerian cab driver in Montréal la blanche (discussed in Chapter 1 and in our interview with Bensaddek).10 Beyond their preoccupation with Quebec’s nonurban territories, some of the directors mentioned in the above paragraph (Denis Côté, Sophie Deraspe, Rafaël Ouellet, and Stéphane Lafleur) have been associated, along with Myriam Verreault, Maxime Giroud, Anne Émond, Chloé Robichaud, Simon Lavoie, and Sébastien Pilote, with the renouveau du cinéma québécois, known in the English-language world as the Quebec New Wave, and which film scholar Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan described as the most dynamic “mouvance” (a loose term he favored over the more cohesive and deliberate “mouvement”) to have emerged in Quebec since the 1960s and cinéma direct (2010, 76). Among the films associated with this trend, which began to emerge in the mid-2000s and had as its precursor Côté’s aforementioned Les états nordiques, are Verreault’s and Henry Bernardet’s À l’ouest de Pluton (West of Pluto, 2008), Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, a Film without Guns, 2008), Giroux’s Demain (2009), Deraspe’s Les signes vitaux (Vital Signs, 2009), Côté’s Elle veut le chaos (All That She Wants, 2008) and Curling (2010), and (Anne) Émond’s Nuit #1 (2011) (see Chapter 8 for a discussion of the renouveau in relation to Denis Côté’s cinema). Characterized by insular qualities and remote locales in suburban or rural areas but also inspired by and in dialogue with “global indie” aesthetics (Baillargeon, 2019, 206), these films feature characters who speak French but “whose experiences as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers” (Bailey, 2010) and epitomize a tendency in 21st-century Quebec cinema to look both inwards (at its own population as it ponders its future in a globalized world) and outwards (at other national traditions and populations beyond its territory) for inspiration.

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Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century: From Borders to Buddy Comedies and Beyond Our volume is divided into three sections containing three or four chapters each, and concludes with three specially conducted interviews with Québécois filmmakers. Part I, “(Re)definitions,” extends the discussions begun in this introduction and further defines (and redefines) the contours, boundaries, and makeup of 21st-century Quebec cinema. Chapter 1 is intended to serve as a second introduction of sorts, which provides close readings of key films that approach Quebec cinema through its porous and shifting internal and external borders. In it, Michael Gott analyzing six recent films, several of which were directed by women, immigrant, and Indigenous filmmakers, and many of which feature a diverse cast of characters who speak a number of languages besides French: Uvanga (Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu, 2014), Une colonie (A Colony, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, 2019), Montréal la blanche (Bachir Bensaddek, 2016), Le meilleur pays du monde (The Greatest Country in the World, Ky Nam Le Duc, 2020), Pays (Boundaries, Chloé Robichaud, 2016), and Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada, Philippe Falardeau, 2014). Gott demonstrates the ways that these films navigate—both onscreen and behind the scenes in the process of their making—the conceptions and realities of hard and soft borders and borderlands, and ultimately argues that Quebec cinema itself functions as a borderland, a space of translation and exchange that reevaluates positions between reimagined local and reoriented global frameworks. This chapter is deliberately longer than the others and is conceived to be used modularly, with each film analyzed in a discrete section of the essay. Chapter 2 engages with intercultural encounters, both on and off screen, in Quebec and Canadian cinema. In this essay, Karine Bertrand explores the world of Arnait Video Productions, a women-run, Inuit/Québécois collective founded in 1991, and discusses their more recent fictional work, codirected by Montreal native Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Igloolik, Nunavut native Madeline Ivalu. Part of a larger trend of collaborative work in Quebec and Canada more broadly of “women indigenizing the screen” (in Bertrand’s words), the three feature films that compose the “Arnait trilogy” invite spectators to travel through time and space and revisit the history of colonization and modernity from the nuanced point of view of insiders, all the while tackling complex questions of assimilation, adaptation, and survivance. Chapter 3, which concludes Part I, also

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focuses on women-directed narratives and seeks to rectify the scarcity of discussions around the internationality of Québécois women directors, confirming their growing importance both within and beyond Quebec’s borders. In this essay, Ylenia Olibet assesses the presence and impact of women auteurs on the international film festival circuit, and discusses Chloé Robichaud’s Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run, 2013) and Sophie Deraspe’s Antigone (2019) as examples of films that both reshape the borders of gender and sexual identities and reevaluate the representation of femininities in Quebec cinema. Part II, “Trends and Genres,” contains three chapters that each analyze different thematic or generic specificities within contemporary Quebec filmmaking. In Chapter 4 Julie-Françoise Tolliver first dives into Quebec’s cinematic past through an analysis of two film adaptations of Claude-Henri Grignon’s 1933 novel Un homme et son péché in order to demonstrate the relationship between agricultural and forestry practices (including fires) and the colonization of the region. The author continues with an investigation of the presence and significance of forest fires in two recent (and also women-directed) Québécois films, Louise Archambault’s Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down, 2019) and Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (Before the Streets, 2016), in order to show how present-day ecological and social concerns shape not only the perception of the role of fire in the land but also define solidarities. The popular “buddy comedy” is the focus of Chapter 5, in which Stéfany Boisvert discusses five of the most successful local comedy films and box office hits of the past two decades: Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 (Érik Canuel, 2006; Alain Desrochers, 2017), De père en flic and De père en flic 2 (Émile Gaudreault, 2009, 2017), and Menteur (Émile Gaudreault, 2019). Through an analysis of these highly popular “summer flicks,” Boisvert demonstrates how a small industry such as Quebec’s currently attempts to counter the hegemony of Hollywood while continuing to be influenced by it. In the process, Boisvert highlights the gendered inflexion of these male-dominated comedies and the ways that the films and their happy endings set themselves apart from other major trends in Quebec cinema, which tends to prefer ambivalent or dramatic conclusions. Part II ends with Chapter 6 and Bill Marshall’s investigation of the revival of the horror genre and the increased presence of First Nation characters (and directors) in Quebec fiction filmmaking. He examines two recent representatives of the “zombie apocalypse” horror subgenre, Robin Aubert’s Les affamés (Ravenous, 2017) and Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum (2019), which offer

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allegorical takes on traumas experienced by individuals and groups, reveal connections between alienation, memory, and wider collective identifications (whether Québécois or Indigenous), and ponder the relationship between humans and our fragile planet. Part III, “Case Studies,” turns to the work and reception of individual Québécois directors who “transcend the national” in various ways. Chapter 7 situates the cinema of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve in relation to the film industries of both Quebec and Hollywood. Arguing that their directing careers simultaneously look inwards and expand outwards, Gemma King analyzes the transnational nature of their output and the ways in which the overlapping and interconnected QuebecHollywood cinemas of the two filmmakers provide an alternative to narratives of monolingual Hollywood hegemony. In Chapter 8 Thibaut Schilt focuses on the reception and perception of Denis Côté’s cinema in Quebec, anglophone Canada, and other parts of the world, and analyzes the iconoclastic auteur’s career through the lens of world film festivals. After considering Côté’s output within the much-discussed renouveau du cinéma québécois trend, Schilt continues with an overview of the various ways that Côté’s cinema “travels” internationally, and concludes with a discussion of its uneven appreciation within Quebec’s borders. In Chapter 8 Mercédès Baillargeon examines the representation of same-sex desire in three films by Xavier Dolan—Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm, 2013), Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World, 2016), and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018), all three coproductions, the first two between France and Canada, the third between Canada and the UK—and analyzes the way homosexuality is depicted in those works across time and national borders as well as the positioning of Dolan himself as a globally celebrated queer filmmaker. Part III concludes with an exploration of the concept of Québécité in another film by Xavier Dolan, 2019’s Matthias & Maxime and in Monia Chokri’s feature debut La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love), released the same year. In their essay, coauthors Loïc Bourdeau and Peadar Kearney argue that these two millennial artists, although proud of their Québécois identity, appear less vocal about Quebec’s sovereignty than filmmakers of previous generations and instead demonstrate strong engagements with more globalized concerns and issues. The volume ends with three interviews conducted with Québécois filmmakers who provide firsthand accounts of their directing career as well as their places within and perspectives on 21st-century Quebec cinema. In the first interview, conducted by Michael Gott and translated

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from the French by Rachel Rider, Denis Chouinard discusses the context of the release of his 1997 film debut Clandestins and his 2001 follow-up feature L’ange de goudron, both of which are early examples of Quebec-produced films concerned with the process of migration and the consequences of immigration. Beyond his directing work, Chouinard offers his perspective as a professor of cinema practice at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and discusses the evolution of Quebec cinema over the past twenty years and the changing ways that future filmmakers approach the medium. Next is Kirsten Smith’s interview with Algerian-born, Montreal-residing film and television director Bachir Bensaddek, who discusses the transnationality of his work in general and his 2016 feature film Montréal la blanche in particular. Bensaddek also ponders the realities and challenges of making films today, and the increasing (and welcome) presence of ethnic minorities, nonnative French speakers, and First Nations characters on Quebec’s screens. In the third and final interview, Karine Bertrand focuses on the Québécois/Inuit women’s film collective Arnait Video Productions and converses with one of its original cofounders, Marie-Hélène Cousineau. In particular, they discuss the making and significance of the “Arnait trilogy,” which is the subject of Bertrand’s Chapter 2 and consists of three feature-length films codirected by Montreal native Cousineau and Nunavut-based Inuk filmmaker Madeline Ivalu, Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain, 2009), Uvanga (2013), and Restless River (La rivière sans repos, 2019). The ten chapters and three interviews in this book represent a thorough but certainly not comprehensive exploration of Quebec’s contemporary cinematic landscape. We hope in particular that it encourages further academic interest in the expanding areas of films by and about immigrants and their experiences and subjectivities and Indigenous peoples in and beyond Quebec. Another area that we were not able to include is contemporary documentary, although numerous fiction films examined in detail in the volume demonstrate a clear lineage from the province’s cinéma direct tradition. The cinematic landscape, which could be characterized more broadly as the “screen” landscape to encompass the increasing overlap of talent behind series and films, is likely to continue to undergo dramatic transformation. As the 21st century progresses, the Quebec industry continues to grow in reputation and success, the production and distribution landscapes mutate due to streaming and global media convergence, and institutional parity initiatives continue to bear fruit. Many of the directors discussed in the introduction and subsequent

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chapters also work in the production of television series, a list that notably includes Sophie Deraspe, Sonia Bonspille Boileau, Tracey Deer, and Philippe Falardeau. The production of series in Quebec has long been a thriving but primarily locally focused endeavor. As local platforms such as (most notably) the Quebec-based Club Illico (owned by local media giant Québécor) commission more series from Quebec with the potential to reach wide global audiences, this will also no doubt become a fruitful area for further academic inquiry.11 Works Cited Bachand, Denis. “Cultural Encounters in Québec Cinema: Identity and Otherness in Denis Chouinard’s Tar Angel.” American Review of Canadian Studies 43.2 (2013): 218–230. ——. “Du national au transnational: l’empreinte documentaire dans les films de Denis Villeneuve, Philippe Falardeau et Kim Nguyen.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 151–166. Bailey, Patricia. “A New Generation of Quebec Filmmakers Captures a Culture Adrift.” This (6 July 2010). https://this.org/2010/07/06/quebec-film/. Baillargeon, Mercédès. “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 202–219. Baillargeon, Mercédès and Karine Bertrand. “Introduction: le transnationalisme du cinéma et des (nouveaux) médias: le contexte québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 137–150. Bélair-Cirino, Marco. “La réforme de la loi 101 du gouvernement Legault décortiquée.” Le Devoir (9 November 2022). https://www.ledevoir.com/ politique/quebec/600986/presentation-de-la-nouvelle-loi-101. Bertrand, Karine. “Canadian Indigenous Cinema: From Alanis Obomsawin to the Wapikoni Mobile.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 105–123. Boisvert, Stéfany. “À l’ombre du géant Netflix: les orientations narratives et idéologiques des séries originales du portail en ligne Club Illico.” Québec Studies 67 (2019): 135–157. Bourgault-Côté, Guillaume. “Cinéma: la parité s’installe à la SODEC.” Le Devoir (24 January 2019). https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/546176/ cinema-la-parite-s-installe-a-la-sodec. Burelle, Julie. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.

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Carruthers, Lee and Charles Tepperman, eds. Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023. Czach, Liz. “The Quebec Heritage Film.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020: 41–60. Czach, Liz and André Loiselle, eds. Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. Gott, Michael. “Introduction: New Directions in cinéma-monde, from Quebec to Kinshasa and the Moon.” Contemporary French Civilization 47.1 (2019): 1–16. ​​Gott, Michael and Thibaut Schilt, eds. Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Higson, Andrew. “The Resilience of Popular National Cinemas in Europe (Part One).” Transnational Screens 12.3 (2021): 199–219. Jean, Marcel. Le cinéma québécois. Montréal: Boréal, 2005. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Mackenzie, Scott and Anna Westerstål Stenport. “The Polarities and Hybridities of Arctic Cinemas.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 125–146. Marshall, Bill. “Cinéma-monde? Towards a Concept of Francophone Cinema.” Francosphères 1.1 (2012): 35–51. ——. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Marsolais, Gilles. Cinéma québécois: de l’artisanat à l’industrie. Montréal: Triptyque, 2011. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ​​Newman, Kathleen. “Notes on Transnational Film Theory.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Eds. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. New York: Routledge, 2010. 3–11. Ransom, Amy. “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Recognition in Turn of the Millennium Québec Film.” American Review of Canadian Studies 43.2 (2013): 176–189. Santoro, Miléna. “An Interview with François Macerola, President and CEO of la Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC).” American Review of Canadian Studies 43.2 (2013): 170–175. Santoro, Miléna, Denis Bachand, Vincent Desroches, and André Loiselle. “Introduction: Special Issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies on Québec Cinema.” American Review of Canadian Studies 43.2 (2013): 157–162.

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Schilt, Thibaut. “An Ostrich, a Backhoe and a Few Ski-Doos: Tracking the Road Movie in Quebec and Beyond.” Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Eds. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 192–215. Sirois-Trahan, Jean-Pierre. “La mouvée et son dehors: renouveau du cinéma québécois.” Cahiers du cinéma 660 (October 2010): 76–78.

Notes 1. A recent book that deals with similar temporal parameters as our own, Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, a collection of essays edited by Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman (2023), was published too late for our contributors to engage with it (though some were able to cite it). While Carruthers and Tepperman’s volume includes many chapters on Englishlanguage Canadian cinema and on documentary and experimental filmmaking, which are outside the purview of our own book, there are a small number of chapters dedicated to Quebec cinema and focused on overlapping topics and filmmakers from different perspectives than those in this volume. In the context of our discussion of how Quebec cinema has changed since 2000, it is notable that Carruthers and Tepperman also point to the turn of the millennium as a crucial inflection point for Canadian cinema. They argue, however, that Canadian films have “not only endured a sharp decline in cultural and commercial status, they also lack the explanatory frameworks that once gave them legibility” (4). 2. In an interview with the editors of the 2013 special issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies, François Macerola, at that time President and CEO of the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC), also used the term “maturity” to characterize the state of Quebec’s film industry in the early 21st century: “Furthermore, the international success and reputation of our films and of our creators speaks to the level of maturity and creativity our cinematography has achieved” (Santoro, 2013, 171). 3. Bill Marshall’s English-language Quebec National Cinema (2001) provides a comprehensive historical account of (mostly) fictional feature films produced in the province from the 1960s to the 1990s. For a brief but useful overview in French of 20th-century Quebec cinema, see Marcel Jean’s Le cinéma québécois (2005). Also see the more recent Cinéma québécois: de l’artisanat à l’industrie by Gilles Marsolais (2011). 4. One conception of transnationalism that is particularly apt in the context of Quebec is what Lionnet and Shih theorize as “minor transnationalism,” characterized by looking “sideways to lateral networks that are not always readily apparent.” This gesture might open the door to an exploration of the “relationships among different margins” (Lionnet and Shih, 2005, 1–2). Seen

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through the optic of francophone studies, in this formulation Quebec national cinema is marginal to France. From a different perspective we might frame Quebec cinema as marginal within dominant North American film structures, even as Montreal serves as a privileged location of global and Hollywood filming and production. In both equations—Quebec in lateral relations with other francophone margins and Quebec in relation to the massive North American industry—it is important to understand the inherent unevenness of transnational film interactions. As Kathleen Newman observes, in cinema, “all relations between center and periphery are uneven” (2010, 10). 5. “Indigenous” (French: autochtone), generally capitalized in English and throughout this volume, is an umbrella term for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. Most, but not all, reserve-based communities in Canada refer to themselves as “First Nations.” “Inuit” (singular: “Inuk”) are another Indigenous group, historically located in the Arctic and legally and culturally distinct from First Nations and Métis. “Métis” are people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry who are part of a specific, recognized Indigenous Nation in Canada with a separate social history. For more information on terminology (and terms to avoid), visit this terminology guide from Queen’s University: https://www. queensu.ca/indigenous/ways-knowing/terminology-guide. 6. Despite the evident importance of both of Chouinard’s films and their relevance to this volume, beyond the interview with the director we opted not to include an in-depth analysis of them because they have already been the topic of significant scholarly attention. On L’ange de goudron, see Bachand (2013) and Schilt (2018). 7. Amy Ransom observes one stage in this move towards a more global outlook by positing that three films from the turn of the 21st century Post Mortem (Louis Bélanger, 1999), Maelström (Denis Villeneuve, 2000), and Un crabe dans la tête (André Turpin, 2001) exemplify a process of “deterritorialization” in which the “writer-directors and performers also participate in the discourse of the post-national; secure in their québécité, they are free to embrace the multicultural, cosmopolitan world city, of which Montreal serves as a unique and dynamic exemplar” (2013, 187). 8. The association Réalisatrices Équitables provides updated statistics on the results of funding parity policies. See https://stats.realisatrices-equitables.com/. 9. Information on production companies and other credits can be found in the individual film listings on the sites of Québec Cinéma, a nonprofit organization charged with promoting the province’s cinema (https://quebeccinema.ca/), and Films du Québec, an independent site that provides in-depth information on fiction filmmaking in the province (https://www.filmsquebec.com/). 10. With its immigrant cab driver who crisscrosses the streets of Montreal, the collectively directed Cosmos (Jennifer Alleyn, Manon Briand, Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Marie-Julie Dallaire, and Arto Paragamian, 1996) is arguably a late 20th-century precursor to Bensaddek’s Montréal la blanche.

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11. See Stéfany Boisvert (2019) for a discussion of the series production by Club Illico. More recently the platform has commissioned series by Falardeau (Le temps des framboises, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022), Deraspe (Motel Paradis, 2022), and Dolan (La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est réveillé, a coproduction with French Canal+). Their series La faille (The Wall, 2019–) has received worldwide distribution, and another notable success is the series M’entends-tu? (Can You Hear Me?, 2018–). Made by Montreal production company Trio Orange and originally broadcast on Télé-Québec, the series was acquired for global distribution by Netflix in 2020.

PART I

(Re)definitions

chapter one

Drawing Outside the Lines Re-bordering the World of Quebec Cinema Michael Gott Drawing Outside the Lines The meaning of the title of Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s 2019 film Une colonie (A Colony) only becomes evident in its final moments, when the young protagonist Mylia links the history of colonization to the diversity of origins present among her classmates at a new school in Montreal. The scene connects to an earlier conversation in a forest between Mylia and her friend Jimmy, who lives on a nearby Abenaki First Nations reserve, in which “drawing outside the lines” is used metaphorically in relation to an impulse to question institutions, social and societal hierarchies, and Eurocentric readings and teachings of history.1 Dulude-De Celles’s film also draws our attention to the almost imperceptible physical boundary line that demarcates the reserve. Its title therefore invites viewers to ponder the sometimes arbitrary and often problematic nature of colonial boundaries and the ways in which contemporary Quebec society erases its own (neo)colonialist impulses. If Une colonie scarcely ventures outside the small rural town where most of the story is set, through the vantage point of young Mylia it suggests that individuals are constantly positioning themselves in relation to a wide-ranging series of borders. These borders are sometimes physical or political but often ideational and narrative. This chapter analyzes six recent films from Quebec that engage with the conceptions and realities of hard and soft borders and borderlands by focusing on their representation and mapping as visual tropes and ideational or ideological constructions. The examples are, in order of appearance: Uvanga (Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu, 2014), Une colonie, Montréal la blanche (Bachir Bensaddek, 2016), Le meilleur pays du monde (The Greatest Country in the World, Ky Nam Le Duc, 2020), Pays (Boundaries, Chloé Robichaud, 2016), and Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada, Philippe Falardeau,

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2014). This list was elaborated to encompass the primary borders at play in Quebec and Quebec cinema. Looking at these films together, I will argue that the cinema of Quebec is fundamentally concerned with positioning itself vis-à-vis borders that are increasingly malleable yet strongly representative of the specificities of Quebec national cinema and of the ways that it intersects with the wider world. I will propose a reading of these films that is focused on the borders they contain onscreen and exemplify in the story of their making and their position within the Quebec cinema ecosystem. In the process, I suggest a way that we as viewers might undertake our own (re)mapping of our mental geography of Quebec cinema through textual and contextual elements. Scholars have observed the prevalence of borders, often the internal variety, within the cinema of Quebec. Daniel Laforest contends that Quebec is “awash with implicit borders and blurry thresholds, making for a multitude of difficult passages inside the official borders of the province” (2019, 213). Bill Marshall describes Quebec as an “‘embedded’ nation within a nation” and declares that the external national boundaries are “reflected in the nation’s internal limits” (2019, 252, 263). The internal divisions and contours of Quebec national and cultural identity are central to the films addressed in this chapter. Québécois cinema of the 21st century, particularly of the past decade, is marked by a growing focus on the internal complexities of the province. At the same time, while Quebec certainly has its own national particularities and differences with the rest of Canada that lend its linguistic, cultural, and ideational borders particular complexity, it cannot but share the geographic and to some extent cultural elements that broadly frame Canada and its cinematic output within a border logic. W. H. New suggests that the 49th parallel, lines between provinces, and other borders and border metaphors tend to preoccupy Canadians (1998, 5–11). Thus, while Quebec cinema is clearly demarcated in a variety of ways within the Canadian nation, it remains useful to also approach it within the framework of Graciela Martínez-Zalce’s understanding of broader Canadian cinema as a “border cinema” (2019, 165). Marshall’s work on Quebec national cinema, going back to the eponymous book in 2001, underscores the interwoven complexities of Quebec national identity as represented in film. The nation, he contends, is “always inevitably pluralized and even destabilized by the competing discourses of and on the nation” (2001, 3). Marshall also draws attention to internal borders and external connections in his call to remap and reimagine Québécois cinema “in ways that get beyond

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hierarchies of centre and periphery” (2019, 260). Notably, using a scene set at the Ontario-Quebec border—which he labels both a border and a non-border simultaneously—in the popular comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Érik Canuel, 2006), he reminds us that film tends to offer nuanced perspectives that present borders as often arbitrary and fluid but also as entities that are perceived in different ways on different sides of them (2019, 262–263). Defining Borders: Hard Lines and Flexible Narratives Looking beyond film studies, some concepts from contemporary border theory offer a useful framework for the closer readings that I will undertake in the following pages. Manlio Graziano posits that borders are fundamentally ambivalent: “Borders are just one of many political objects: they are multidimensional and multifunctional in nature and their political, legal, social, moral, and even psychological footprint changes in time and space” (2018, 1). The multidimensional character of borders means that they are zones where contact and conflict and symbolism and reality overlap and intersect (1–3). Thus, we can observe that it is essential to not essentialize borders and our uses of them, for borders “should be regarded as a means, not an end” (3). Watching films and approaching them as objects of study help us understand that borders take most of their significance from their deployment as narratives. This is not to say that hard borders, the lines clearly demarcated by walls, fences, or border guards, are not important, even if they rarely appear in my examples. External territorial frontiers and internal social categorizations are intertwined (Fassin, 2011, 214) and “hard” borders owe their existence to the discursive entities known as “soft” borders, which Klaus Eder understands as the “images” that define what nations are and who is perceived to belong (or not belong) within their boundaries (2006, 256–257). Eder uses “image” metaphorically within a wider conception of “communicative acts which involve the circulation of stories” (257). However, it is clear that within the notion of borders as narratives, the image—be it cinematic or still—offers potentially rich impact on collective understandings of belonging. “Hard” versus “soft” is one key concept that helps us grasp the spatial and symbolic existence of borders, at least if we resist framing them in binary opposition. Another helpful distinction can be drawn between borderlines and borderlands. It would be tempting to classify the former

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as solid, concerned with containment, and the latter as flexible and open to exchange. However, both the “line” and the “land” are multifaceted. For New, writing on the role of borders in conceptions of Canada, borderlines are “conceptual edges” while borderlands are “territories of translation” (1998, 5). Translation, in the following films, will be both a linguistic process that sometimes takes place on the individual level as speakers switch between languages and a broader metaphor. Rejecting a binary approach to borders, New contends that “boundaries function both as descriptions of concrete agreement and as metaphors of relationship and organization” (5). It is because borders are multiple and not fixed that they are such a common object of attention in 21st century films from Quebec. These films do not define borders, instead they consider individual and sometimes collective positioning in relation to them. This is why physical maps and instances of mapping are prevalent in the films, as my case studies will reveal. I would like to suggest that the concept of positioning is an apt way to grapple with and grasp the multiple and multifarious borders in and of Quebec cinema. The films covered here represent various types of borders, including internal and external, and the complex layers of Quebec identity. Collectively they cover the primary ways that Quebec is positioned within the world and that people are situated internally in relationship to Quebec. Some borders are spatially conceived, from unmarked land crossings to airports and transnational technological connectivity. Others circulate as ideas or narratives. None of those that we see onscreen coincides with a strict definition of a hard border as a line patrolled and controlled by the state. Therefore, this sample of border experiences and encounters naturally lends itself to a discussion of individual and collective positioning. What interests me the most here is not a classification of borders but the question of how characters grapple with, encounter, or talk about borders and how the films’ production contexts and stories relate to borders. As the notion of “drawing outside the lines” highlighted in my title suggests, maps and mapping are central to thinking about positioning vis-à-vis borders. It is important to draw a clear distinction between my use of positioning and how positioning works in what is likely the most common association of the term: as navigation through GPS. The experience of physically crossing borders and/or mentally conceptualizing them is profoundly different when one’s image of space and its boundaries comes from GPS technologies rather than traditional maps. How we “map” has undergone a dramatic transformation in the 21st

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century. William Rankin argues that the shift from maps to GPS has accompanied “the creation of a new geographic subjectivity—a new way of seeing and interacting with the earth that involves a move from totality to local positioning” (2016, 2–3). GPS situates individuals on the local level, outside of wider context. Representational maps, on the other hand, start with the totality and require individuals to actively find their position in relationship to totalities delimited by lines and distinguished by colors. This is of course quite limiting, but the symbolism of the map remains crucial as individuals establish their positioning in relation to their nation (or nations) and the world. Film scholar Dudley Andrews has suggested that in a world of networks and Google Maps, the cognitive map is irrelevant in cinema (2018, 28). I contend that, to the contrary, we need films (and other screen media) to fulfill the role of the cognitive map because GPS and other mapping technology does not offer the totalizing and relational possibilities of representational maps that once served as the primary source of individual and collective conceptions of geography. More importantly, although Web 2.0 technology does function as a link in one of my examples, the physical borders represented on a map still retain crucial importance for some. Even as traditional representational maps are no longer up to the task of fully representing the interconnected realities of the world of transnational film production and circulation, the map enjoys continued currency as a metaphor for positioning within and beyond the film text. All of the following examples strategically deploy maps as—I argue— symbolically charged props that imbue the scenes we see onscreen with meaning but also guide our process of viewing these films collectively in relation to our cognitive map of Quebec cinema. In Cartographic Cinema, Tom Conley posits that watching a film is a form of cartography (2007, 13) and suggests that a map in cinema, whatever form it may take, serves an ontological function that encourages us to consider “where we come from and where we may be going” (2007, 3). The recurring image of maps and mapping motifs in the six films I analyze, both in navigational and pedagogical contexts, might trigger in viewers an impulse to think critically about identities and boundaries. To rephrase Conley’s formulation, these maps inspire us to think about where we are and how we relate to others. By extension, this also implicates the boundaries of our conceptions of Quebec. Acknowledging the inadequacy of maps that delineate inflexible border binaries, Marshall has suggested that “remappings” are required in order to reimagine Quebec cinema beyond the nation and outside of hierarchies of center

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and periphery in order to “give it its rightful creative and dynamic place in a mapping of global cinema” (2019, 260). Examined together, these films offer us an alternative mapping of Quebec cinema and identity that is constantly being repositioned from within in relation to postcolonial movements, the colonial past, cultural identity, immigration, and Indigenous cultures. Uvanga: Re-mapping Québécois Film from the North We begin with a film that offers a dramatic remapping of Quebec cinema and repositioning of the identities of its protagonists. Uvanga, a 2014 drama by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu, does not at first glance fit clearly within Québécois cinema. The dialogue is in English and Inuktitut and the narrative transpires entirely in Nunavut. Uvanga’s connection to Quebec comes in its funding from SODEC (in addition to Telefilm Canada and Nunavut Film), Quebec-born director Marie-Hélène Cousineau, and the way it positions the identity of protagonists Tomas and Anna. Teenage Tomas (Lukasi Forrest) and his mother Anna (Marianne Farley) are Montreal natives. The film opens with their arrival at the Igloolik airport in Nunavut. It is quickly revealed that Anna had a brief relationship with Tomas’s deceased Inuk father and that Tomas has never set foot in Igloolik. The purpose of their voyage is for him to discover his roots. This premise initially situates the film in relation to the tradition of narratives that link Québécois identity to a personal exploration of the territories that constitute the province, particularly the more remote northern regions. Such travels are common in Quebec cinema, especially in films with a “road” component (Schilt, 2018, 196). On one level, Uvanga’s setting farther north in Nunavut expands the horizons beyond the province, positioning Tomas and Anna’s Montreal background in relationship with a spatially and culturally distant family or personal heritage. Yet while it expands the possible realm of affiliations, the narrative remains firmly within the more recently prevalent trope of what Miléna Santoro (2020) labels “rural (re)turns” by young Québécois. Tomas’s initial encounter with the Inuit facet of his identity is staged in a series of intermediate spaces that function as borderlands as defined by New. Inside the airport he is introduced to his uncle and brother Travis (Travis Kunnuk). The car ride between the airport and the family home offers Tomas and the viewer an initial introduction to the

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landscape, culture (they sing along enthusiastically to a country song in Inuktitut), and his family. The drive provides a tangible and immersive space of transition between the airport and the family home with no evident technological equivalent. When they enter the home we sense that the gravity, physicality, and sensory experience of coming to terms with previously unknown family and feeling out new spaces, sounds, sensations, and tastes of local culture cannot be replicated by Google Maps or Skype. Thus, physical distance is reemphasized as a border consideration, in this case a form of potential division. As Anna explains to Tomas when he later asks why they had never visited before, the flight is long and expensive. If Igloolik has become a hub of Inuit cinema—“the Arctic film capital of the world,” as Mackenzie and Stenport put it (2019, 137)—its remote airport is far from a transit hub and currently travelers must change in Iqaluit to reach any of Canada’s metropolises. A symbolically rich map image appears prominently in the scene in which Tomas and Anna enter the home, as if a reminder of the ongoing process of positioning that Tomas is undergoing since landing in Igloolik. With a large map displayed on the wall in the background, Tomas meets his grandparents, is initiated into eating seal meat, and discovers part of his father’s backstory when another woman storms in to confront his mother. The map, which the camera either frames in small fragments or blurs through shallow focus, is not legible or identifiable. It therefore exists in a symbolic realm as an indicator of Tomas’s process of cultural and affective wayfinding, a negotiation of “multiple ethnicities” (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2019, 139). As a cinematic and cine-industrial metaphor, the image suggests to viewers that they are off the map of their typical (cinematic) experience and—much like Tomas— beyond the charted realm of their existing knowledge. The remainder of the film, with its slow-paced exploration of the intertwined stories of Arctic space and Tomas’s family history and culture, maps that space for protagonists and viewers. Landscape is filmed in a notable fashion in Uvanga: not as space to simply be traversed in order to get somewhere or an exoticized setting to explore, but as part of quotidian existence and historical culture. It is a slow and meaningful engagement with place. Despite the grounded emphasis on culturally and geographically particular sensory experiences, Uvanga is not closed to the wider world. It is the product of the Arnait Video Production collective, founded in 1991 by the codirectors of the film, Marie-Hélène Cousineau (a FrancoQuébécoise from Montreal) and Madeline Ivalu (an Inuk from Igloolik), in order to promote affiliation between Indigenous and settler cultures

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(Mackenzie and Stenport, 2016, 154). The collective in general and the collaboration between Cousineau and Ivalu, who initially had no common language, form a productive border space: “the technologies of the South are being repurposed by Arnait for the North in order to connect locally and globally with other indigenous communities” (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2016, 154). The positioning in space that is used when one looks at the world from the Arctic is notable in the context of this chapter. The Igloolik films reverse and question the conception of the North as an “out there” or faraway place. It is the “South” (Montreal in this case) that is “far,” with all of the symbolism attributed to this dual geographic fact and spatial metaphor: inaccessible, physically remote, opaque, and culturally distant. When approaching the film from within the framework of Quebec, the prominent map in the early scene of Uvanga (which reappears later in the film) also signals and symbolizes a radical remapping of how we view Québécois and Canadian cinema. Although Quebec is also home to Inuit people, primarily in the region of Nunavik, the Arctic has rarely been explored as part of Quebec cinema (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2019, 126). The success of Inuit cinema has led scholars to suggest that it be classified as a third Canadian national cinema after Canadian and Québécois or that Canadian cinema constitutes a “trilingual national cinema” (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2019, 126). While emphasizing categorizations might risk obfuscating the degree of exchange between these cinemas and the cultures they represent, approaching Inuit cinema as simultaneously part of Québécois production and having a hub of its own opens up a new vantage point on the film ecosystem of Quebec, which generally originates with SODEC funding and flows outward to intersect with a variety of borders and border spaces. It also demonstrates how, both through the Arctic and more widely through global Indigenous networks, Inuit cinema incessantly intersects and interacts with global cinemas. Both Arnait and the Montreal-based but itinerant Wapikoni Mobile project have generated connections that reflect a “globalized Indigenous cinema” (Bertrand, 2019, 119). Une colonie: Re-mapping Quebec’s Internal Borderlands The geographic distance of Nunavut and Nunavik aptly symbolizes a new vantage point on or positioning of Quebec cinema that extends beyond the borders of the province. The next example involves positioning

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that remaps Quebec from within. Une colonie’s director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles was inspired by her collaborations on Wapikoni Mobile projects to create a coming-of-age story that positions its young protagonist and her adolescent struggles in relation to an Indigenous classmate, and by extension his community and its marginal positioning within mainstream Québécois society. Dulude-De Celles is a settler Québécois who has worked extensively with the Wapikoni Mobile project, having done five one-month stints in Indigenous communities, notably Innu Takuaikan Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam, to help guide young filmmakers from those communities on their short films.2 In Une colonie boundaries and thresholds are often blurry and are not represented as spaces clearly demarcated by lines on maps or walls and barriers on the terrain. The line motif is nonetheless central in Une colonie, which considers how its protagonist positions herself in relation to these institutionally generated lines. At a crucial turning point in the narrative, shots emphasize the lines painted on the gymnasium floor at the rural school where Mylia (Emilie Bierre) awkwardly attends a school party, an experience that is itself an elaborate dance that requires her to tread delicately between acceptance by the “popular” crowd and her own sense of individualism. Later the camera lingers again on painted lines at a school, this time in the outdoor playground where Mylia’s sister Camille (Irlande Côté) starts as a student after the siblings must move to Montreal with their mother when their parents separate. These lines are linked to the colonial lines of demarcation (and possession) drawn on maps by Mylia’s closing voice-over, in which she reads a letter to her friend Jimmy (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie). The voice-over describes the act of purposefully drawing outside the boundary lines in a geography class assignment about colonial Africa, as Mylia walks from the socially striated space of the schoolyard onto a more remote wooded path, a physical manifestation of the gesture of scholastic recusancy that she is recounting. As she literally seeks a path less traveled, Mylia’s narration connects the history of colonization to the diversity she encountered at her new school in Montreal. Among her classmates she mentions those with origins in Africa, Spain, Greece, and France. The fact that these symbolic lines are all linked to the educational system is surely not by chance. Une colonie takes a broader look at life beyond school than films such as Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2011), which Charlie Michael frames within the context of an emergent French-language subgenre we might call the “classroom film” that

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has provided a framework for explorations of national social fabric (2013, 29). However, the film emphasizes the links between educational systems, pedagogy, and national and cultural identity. The voice-over scene connects to an earlier conversation between Mylia and her Abenaki friend Jimmy—who lives on a First Nations reserve near her previous home—in which “drawing outside the lines” is used metaphorically in relation to an impulse to question institutions and social and societal hierarchies exemplified by a Eurocentric history of citizenship linked to colonization and “exploration.” Mylia first met Jimmy outside of school when he rescued her and her sister from an awkward situation with other local kids. It is something that he does again for her later, reversing the white savior trope. But their most meaningful initial encounters took place in the classroom, where they were seated next to each other for “Histoire et éducation à la citoyenneté” [History and Citizenship Education]. The introduction to this course both for viewers and the onscreen students is set against the background of a wall map and a globe framing the teacher as she presents the purpose of the class (turned so that Africa is facing Mylia, whose perspective is espoused by the camera, foretelling the voice-over in the final scene). Jimmy is frequently frustrated by the fashion in which citizenship is delineated by the curriculum and some of his fellow students and speaks up when one employs “we” in a discussion about French settlers in a fashion that clearly draws a line of demarcation that leaves Jimmy and his ancestors outside of the first person plural construction. Mylia is only a passive observer to these in-class confrontations, but she does find her own voice and perspective on her positioning, symbolized by her desire to consult other maps outside of class. A close-up of a map in a book about “the First Nations of Canada” clearly expresses Mylia’s burgeoning adolescent fascination with Jimmy and her interest in thinking outside the lines laid out in her History and Citizenship class. The type of map is notable, for there are no lines to demarcate the territories shown on it. Each First Nations community is indicated with a colored triangle that does not represent where the official Indigenous space “ends” and the rest of Quebec begins. In other words, if one takes the right approach this map can be read in a fashion that does not readily distinguish between a Québécois “nous autres” and Indigenous outsiders.3 Within the physical space of the narrative, a roadside sign that indicates the boundary of the reserve is featured in an earlier shot when Mylia and Camille deliver a card to Jimmy to thank him for helping the latter. The sisters do not seem to pay much attention to the boundary marker indicating “Odanak:

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Fig. 1.1: Une colonie

Territoire Abenaki” and the physical manifestation of this line is banal or even imperceptible aside from the signage. It is framed as insignificant as well, with “Odanak” competing for attention in the middle of a long shot that frames it amidst a crooked conglomeration of road signs for sleepy byways. Yet if this line is spatially and visibly prosaic, it clearly retains its ideational significance for many. One of Mylia’s new friends at school recounts that she has never been to the reserve and spouts a variety of antiquated and racist clichés about what life there must be like. Through these discussions and the classroom scenes and curriculum, Une colonie consistently points to the lingering presence of major ideational borders within Quebec. The framing of its exploration of borders within the context of a coming-of-age tale posits that ideas about self and others are intricately connected to the process of individual positioning vis-à-vis the community. Reviewers from outside of Quebec and Canada seemed to focus on the coming-of-age component, a well-trodden cinematic path, without noting how the film inserts the question of interactions with the Indigenous “other” into the everyday experience of finding one’s place in society as an adolescent.4 Dulude-De Celles also highlights the central role of educational systems in this process by pointing out the exclusions but also the omissions. For instance, when Mylia asks Jimmy how to say something in Abenaki, he admits that he doesn’t speak a

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word of the language. Borderland “translation,” then, is a wider process of cultural comprehension and dialogue. Une colonie provides an example of how a film of any genre—or an individual such as Mylia—can look outward at the world from a new perspective from one location. This gesture of positioning poses questions about Quebec’s history as a colony, its perceptions of itself as colonized, and its current status as the destination for many immigrants from the francosphere. On another level, the idea of coloring outside the lines on a geography project exemplifies the continuing appeal of the map motif in cinema. Mylia challenges the official pedagogical map of Quebec, pursuing the type of pluralized and decentered (re)mapping that Marshall (2019) calls for. Her mapping within the narrative also functions as an apt metaphor for the process of critically viewing and reading the positioning of films as texts and products of a system. Yes, it is possible to imagine and draw new lines, but the existing ones and their associated baggage, colonial or otherwise, remain on the map and still need to be accounted for in our mental mappings of Quebec. Montréal la blanche: A Journey through Implicit Borders in Montreal Bachir Bensaddek’s Montréal la blanche (2016), conceptualizes some of the “implicit borders and blurry thresholds” (Laforest, 2019) that delineate the global dimensions of Quebec’s internal border zones from the perspective of a taxi driver from Algeria’s Christmas Eve itinerary through Montreal. Through his interactions with a cast of characters that range from Santa Claus to an Algerian pop singer in hiding, the film explores a variety of temporal, cultural, and affective borders. Amokrane (Rabah Aït Ouyahia), a taxi driver who immigrated to Canada in the 1990s, is haunted by the murder of his family by Islamists during Ramadan. He plans to spend December 24 driving clients around Montreal to avoid traumatic memories that he now associates with the start of the Muslim holy month during which they were killed. The coincidence of Christmas Eve with Ramadan sets the stage for a series of encounters that map what Beatrice Guenther calls the “transcultural coordinates” (2021, 132) of Bensaddek’s film and of Montreal. Amokrane’s December 24 itinerary is altered by an encounter with former singer Kahina (Karina Aktouf), a woman who also immigrated to Montreal in the 1990s after escaping an attempt on her life by Islamists.

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Maps only make a brief appearance in the film, but the concept of mental mapping is foregrounded through the recurring motif of transit zones and an engagement with the ideational boundaries within immigrant communities and between them and wider Québécois society. The visual landscape of Montréal la blanche is replete with imagery suggestive of border spaces and boundaries. The scene of sometimes uneasy hybridity is set by the harmonious juxtaposition of Maghrebi music being played by street musicians with the backdrop of snowy Montreal holiday streetscapes. There will be encounters and exchanges between Christians and Muslims and between the religious and the secular. Kahina, for instance, forgets that it is Ramadan and offers her observant ex-husband a daytime coffee. Religion is also mediated by technology, as when Amokrane receives his call to prayer on a phone app, resulting in the juxtaposition of onscreen images of Mecca projected to him in a drab shopping center parking lot where he has stopped for a nap. The varied positioning of Amokrane and Kahina in relation to mainstream Québécois society is foregrounded throughout their exchanges and she chides him for thinking in terms of “nous” (the Algerians) and the Québécois. For her part, Kahina has actively sought to avoid the Algerian community because she fears being recognized. However, as she accepts the help of Amokrane to reunite her with her daughter, they must rely on an unofficial network of Algerians in Montreal to track down the whereabouts of her ex-husband. As they traverse the metropolis, the large Maghrebi community is nodded to with images such as a “Maghrebia” shop window they drive past and visits to cafés frequented by Algerian immigrants.5 Perhaps the most significant borders in the film are related to Amokrane’s past and the traumatic memories that he carries with him around Montreal. The present is interspersed with several flashback scenes showing the night that Amokrane visited his family and they were subsequently murdered. The scenes were shot in Tunisia because Bensaddek wanted to capture the true feeling of Algeria but was not able to film there (see the interview with Bensaddek at the end of this book). On one level, these episodes reflect Amokrane’s mental positioning; he may be in Quebec, but his thoughts are constantly drifting to a lost family and home in a way that only his wife understands, until he meets Kahina. On a different level, the presence of this onscreen subjectivity in Montreal leads to encounters behind the scenes, in the form of the voyage to the Maghreb to shoot the flashback scenes. Similarly traumatic scenes appear in Sophie Deraspe’s 2019 Antigone, another film whose narrative

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space is otherwise confined to Montreal, demonstrating how Quebec’s ethnic and cultural makeup—like its film industry—is inextricably linked to the trajectories and memories of its diverse residents. In Bensaddek’s film the trope of mobility is both suggestive of these implicit boundaries and used to navigate them. Road movies are ideally suited to explore the changing parameters of individual and social identities and positioning (Gott, 2016) and Montréal la blanche deploys many tools of the genre as it follows Amokrane’s course across Montreal. The film’s most prevalent and visible boundaries and borderlines are related to mobility, both physical and virtual. Beatrice Guenther reads the taxi’s trajectory across the city as a metaphor for the act of migration; even beyond that, the film is replete with symbols of the constant struggle for mobility. This is indeed suggestive of the process of immigration and a reminder that to “immigrate” is not just a voyage that simply entails moving from country A to country B but a continuing process. Both protagonists are still actively working to position themselves in relation to mainstream Québécois society, to their past, and to the Algerian community in Montreal. As Guenther also points out, the parade of characters who temporarily share space with the two Algerian-born protagonists also demonstrates that Quebec culture is itself not monolithic (2021, 132). This includes a professional Santa Claus and his helper being driven between various stops on his Christmas Eve itinerary and a pair of unpleasant men who harass Kahina and question why she and Amokrane cannot speak English. Another notable passenger is a woman with Chinese roots. Her conversation with Amokrane cleverly undermines assumptions (whether positive or negative) that many individuals hold about identity and origins. When she states that she is from “far away … the Gaspé peninsula,” the cab driver is perplexed, suggesting that she is “not only from Gaspé” and surely has “origins” elsewhere (“vous n’êtes pas juste de la Gaspésie, vous avez des origines”). To his surprise, she reveals that she was born there and is a practicing Catholic on her way to a Christmas celebration. On one level the brief conversation reminds us of the spatial immensity of Quebec—Gaspé is some 900 kilometers from Montreal—and that being from “far away” can also encompass origins within Quebec. The ethnic “origins” of the woman from rural Quebec problematize the common conception of a divide within Quebec between multicultural metropolis and provincial regions (Czach and Loiselle, 2020, 8–9). With the latter example in mind, we can build on Guenther’s suggestion and draw on the conventions of road cinema to read the space

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of the taxi as a microcosm and even a metaphor for Quebec itself. Two common elements of road cinema are germane here. First, the voyage is often concerned with defining or changing the home left behind through a voyage elsewhere. Second, the confined space of the car compels disparate individual travelers to engage with each other (Gott, 2016). This often precludes interactions with the world outside of the vehicle and mobility theorists talk about a distinction between “inhabiting the car” and “inhabiting the road” (Urry, 2007, 125–126). However, the nature of a taxi as a hybrid of private and public space means that driver and passenger are confined and placed in a position conducive to exchange for a limited period and the turnover puts a constant stream of people in this position. Within the national “home” of Amokrane’s taxi, all “residents” are in motion and constantly positioning themselves and their identities in relation to others. The fact that they are crisscrossing Montreal rather than undertaking a linear voyage between points further underscores what seems to be a central idea behind the film: that Quebec is in motion and the identities it contains are diverse and constantly evolving. Even in the absence of linear spatial progression, Amokrane and Kahina’s shared quest enables a metaphorical journey towards personal growth and transformation that is expected in more conventional cinematic road trips. The vehicle is most evidently a workplace for Amokrane, within which he engages with the broad range of people who are compelled to temporarily share a confined space. This accommodation is rendered more complex by the fact that the space also serves as an extension of home for Amokrane. The taxi becomes a domestic space within which he phones his wife and daughter, checking in and attempting to parent remotely, breaks the Ramadan fast by “sharing” soup via FaceTime with his wife, and offers the type of hospitality that might occur in the living room when he shares his wife’s makrout with Santa and his assistant. Offering a comic twist on the overlapping encounter of cultural traditions, Santa finds the cookies dry and downs a swig of liquor from a flask instead of the mint tea that his “host” says would usually accompany them. Language and linguistic difference also are brought to the fore in the micro-space of the taxi, with Amokrane and Kahina switching between French and Arabic in complex ways to nuance their discussion (Guenther, 2021, 131). The tensions in the province between English and French are also nodded to in the encounter with the English-speaking duo. However, just as the two Algerians have complicated linguistic postures, the two loutish men are more complex

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than stereotypical closed-minded Anglos. One appears to be fluent in French and serves as a translator for the other, who despite describing himself as “half Lebanese” (providing the opportunity for Amokrane to point out the distinction between Algeria and Lebanon), does not appear to speak either Arabic or French fluently. The episode demonstrates that the space of transcultural “possibility of community” (Guenther, 2021, 136) in Montréal la blanche is not utopian. Most, though not all, encounters in the vehicle are positive or at least pleasant, but Bensaddek also made a point to include brief scenes with clients who choose to not engage in conversation during their rides. Such interludes suggest that what has been theorized as “reasonable accommodation” (122) between majority and minority communities need not always involve an active process of dialogue. Like the nation, the taxi is a space of practical accommodation in accordance with accepted social codes. That they can get out at the end, showing that there is an “overlap” between cultures and positions without the necessity for them to fully merge and become identical (135) highlights the constant process of positioning in relation to blurry borders and thresholds. We only briefly see an image of literal mapping, but it is symbolically significant. When Kahina leaves the car looking for her daughter, Amokrane takes the opportunity to verify his suspicion that she is in fact the famed Algerian singer by pulling a CD case with her picture from the glove compartment. As he scrutinizes the photo on it, the case is framed momentarily next to the map screen on his phone. Amokrane appears to navigate through the city using his expansive taxi driver’s knowledge of the street grid, so the GPS seems superfluous. Yet the juxtaposition of the screen, showing his positioning on the streets of Montreal, with the CD image that represents important memories and a link to his Algerian past, is clearly symbolic of his quest, which involves geographic and temporal displacement and (re)orientation. To truly find his way in Québécois society he did not need a map but an encounter with an almost ghost of the past. Likewise, bearing in mind the observations that Bensaddek portrays Quebec as a mutable entity, it is appropriate that the only map we see does not represent a totality but one of many possible individual positions.

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Le meilleur pays du monde: Positioning Borderlines and Border Discourses By contrast, Le meilleur pays du monde (Ky Nam Le Duc, 2020) explicitly addresses national borders from the opening scene, which frames an empty forest into which two hispanophone migrants emerge. As we soon learn, the borders are about to close after the fictional election of a far-right party. The narrative focuses on a group of characters of various origins who reside in Montreal but must face choices about where they can and should go in response to the impending border closure. Le Duc’s film continues an explicit discussion present in the previous films of what nous means and who is included. It will be reformulated in a distinct way by the end, through a trio that forms a seemingly unlikely “we.” The film also engages with the parameters of “we” as an implicit feature of collective discourse throughout the narrative. The director has expressed his desire to use cinema to prompt questions about “our québécitude” (Groguhé, 2021). In Le meilleur pays du monde, he channels this into a reflection on the ideational borders of Quebec, in the process undertaking a “remapping”—to use Marshall’s (2019) term—of the province and its cinema. The film is fundamentally concerned with borders in their varied forms and functions. The premise was inspired by the election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 (Groguhé, 2021). In the scenario conceived by Le Duc, a far-right, anti-immigrant party has come to power in Quebec and announced plans to close the province’s borders. In the opening sequence we join two Latin American migrants trudging through the forest towards the Canadian border with the United States. They are confronted by two men in the middle of an open, ice-covered field. The other side of this visually imperceptible boundary—which we learn is the border—is guarded by two men with snowmobiles. This scene offers incisive insight into borders as ideational constructions. The encounter marks the only ostensibly “hard” borderline that we see onscreen in any of the films discussed here. In doing so it illustrates what Eder refers to as “soft borders,” discursively constructed ideas about national contours and who does or does not fit within them (2006, 256–257). Several aspects of this scene are notable. First, we must take it for granted that this is a physical border. There is no evident, visible line of demarcation, let alone a wall, barrier, fence, or even an official border guard. Moreover, there is no apparent natural reason for a border to

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Fig. 1.2: Le meilleur pays du monde

be here. The empty expanses remind us of the arbitrariness of many political borders. Yet if the boundary is invisible and the border depicted as banal, we are reminded of the tangible hardships of migration and border-crossing by the sound of crunching snow and ice beneath the migrants’ feet. This winter setting also demarcates what we could interpret as a sign of crossing into Québécois cinema. Winter landscapes in general and snowmobiles in particular are hallmarks of the province’s filmic output (Laforest, 2019, 225; Schilt, 2018) and Le Duc’s film is replete with snow-filled space that frames the protagonists as they position themselves within and in relation to Quebec. Most significant are the informal border guards, who announce to the migrants in English that they cannot pass because the border closes that day: “Canada doesn’t want you anymore.” The gesture illustrates the discourse of borders and the discursive underpinnings of political boundaries. They are not, of course, representatives of Canada nor do they officially speak for it, yet as the plot reveals, their enunciation of borders is part of discourses and debates that have concrete political and tangible effects. They ultimately stand aside when one of the men explains that they have nowhere else to go because the situation in the US is terrible and that the border is in fact scheduled to close later that night. One of the men in the begrudging welcome committee grumbles that “there has to be a limit.” If the unofficial border patrol does not effectively bar the two men from crossing, what follows the subsequent cut demonstrates that the widespread circulation of narratives of borders and limits can indeed be highly significant. Next, we see an intertitle situating the action in the time of “One election earlier.” As the static

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camera frames another interaction between (presumably) locals and “others,” we hear radio hosts spewing a blend of talking points now widely familiar in North America and Europe about insecurity, the difficulty of “assimilation,” and a “crisis of limits.” As the radio diatribe continues, the elderly Hiên (Nguyen Thanh Tri) stocks the shelves of his small grocery shop, a task that is interrupted by eggs smashing against the front window of the shop. The act of vandalism is presumably linked to the anti-immigration discourse on the radio, which is reflected in the “limits” comment at the border and, crucially, to the grave and tangible effects of the election. Telling stories, the opening scenes suggest, is linked to both “soft” and “hard” iterations of borders. The remainder of the narrative follows the interwoven yet divergent destinies of a small group of people with different positions in Quebec as they grapple with their personal responses to the impending border closure. There is Hiên, his daughter Phuong (Alice Tran) and her partner Alex (Mickaël Goui), and the young Junior (Stanley Junior Jean-Baptiste), whose mother has left him under Alex and Phuong’s care. Their choices reflect a variety of positions that immigrants and their offspring take towards borders. Phuong, who works as a corporate lawyer, follows her father’s advice to leave before the far-right party comes to power. She was born in Montreal but opts to relocate to the land of her parents, which she sees as a place with a more prosperous future. Her orientation and status as a Canadian citizen endowed with ready access to mobility is in stark contrast with the two incoming immigrants in the opening scene. We see no images of her voyage or arrival, as if the process of her mobility is utterly banal and unworthy of attention. Instead, she departs and we see her in media res of her new life in Vietnam when on a video call to Hiên. She turns the laptop to show a vista of the rapidly burgeoning skyline of Saigon and encourages her father to join her. Hiên sells his store and has offers to buy his house, but is hesitant to leave and perhaps sees himself as more Québécois than his daughter who was born there. Hiên does not say much, but some insight into his attachment is suggested when he quotes Gilles Vigneault’s celebrated song “Mon pays” in response to Alex’s complaint that it is too cold to venture out: “mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.” The song is an unofficial anthem of Quebec and by quoting it Hiên situates himself as culturally “assimilated.” However, the citation comes as he is listening to Vietnamese pop music, suggesting that his positioning is nuanced and complex. The song is by Tuấn Ngọc, who also left Vietnam in the 1970s (to settle in the US) and, according to

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Le Duc, whose status for the Vietnamese diaspora resembles that of Vigneault, “an embodiment of a nation that doesn’t quite exist but that is loved and hoped by many” (Gott, 2022). Just as Hiên sees his place in Quebec differently than Phuong, we discover that Alex’s family has a very different perspective than him. His brother is an ultra-nationalist leading a campaign to send threatening letters to immigrants. The primary narrative thread builds from this idea that blood ties are not absolute, revolving around the formation of an unlikely multigenerational and multiethnic alliance—or perhaps family—of choice that includes Hiên, Alex (who has settler origins), and Junior (who is Black). This comes to pass as Alex deals with being left behind by Phuong and Junior is abandoned by his mother Roseline (Schelby Jean-Baptiste), who tells Alex that she needs to leave him for a few days so that she can visit her ill mother in the United States. She apparently lacks legal status and says she will go “as she came”—presumably a clandestine crossing like the one that opens the film—and must do so before the borders are closed and additional security added. Alex argues that it is too dangerous in the winter, but agrees to keep Junior. Junior’s stay is much longer than anticipated and it is revealed that Roseline intended to leave the boy with Alex and Phuong indefinitely because she could not properly support him. The placement of this triumvirate of varied backgrounds at the center of the film confirms at least one half of Denis Bachand’s observation that the preponderant currents in contemporary Quebec cinema are interculturality and father–son relationships (2008, 57). If the intercultural component is clear, it is notable that the Le Duc focuses on a biological father–daughter pairing and the reimagined family is comprised of fathers by choice rather than blood. The trio’s allegiance of choice is set against the recurring backdrop of winter snow. Le Duc juxtaposes the wintry background so typical of Québécois cinema—and for him, highly evocative of Quebec (Gott, 2022)—with a diverse cast of characters, both Québécois and more recent immigrants, with origins in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (and presumably via Haiti, as in his previous film Oscillations, although not explicitly stated here). The dialogue is primarily in French, but there are meaningful conversations in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, further adding to the construction of a borderland zone of exchange and contact within this film that is ostensibly about borderlines. Le meilleur pays du monde is also pushing the representational frontiers of the Quebec film industry by telling previously untold stories that require “effort” and are difficult to cast because there is not a significant pool of actors from the

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communities being represented (Groguhé, 2021). In telling their stories onscreen and developing a small but important new talent pool, Le Duc is changing the contours of Quebec cinema from within. It is perhaps not incidental that the celebrated song that Hiên quotes, Vigneault’s “Mon pays,” was commissioned by the National Film Board for the soundtrack of Arthur Lamothe’s 1965 La neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan. Just as Hiên positions himself within Quebec culture by quoting it, Le Duc’s reference situates his directorial efforts within a Québécois lineage. The cinematic circulation of stories involved in “soft” border creation involves both what we see onscreen and the infrastructure and apparatus that makes it possible from behind the screen. Pays: Internal Limits at the (Fictional) Boundary of Canada Pays (Chloé Robichaud, 2016) is a film about politics that has a preoccupation with landscapes, particularly of liminal spaces that are emphasized by the English title Boundaries. Newfoundland stands in for the fictional island nation of Besco as filming location, resulting in a border-crossing that involves a fictional border onscreen and an actual provincial boundary-crossing on the level of production.6 From the opening sequence, borders as a spatial concept are visually juxtaposed with the film’s inquiry into the place of women in the world of politics. Pays begins with three silent, static portraits of the women at the center of the film’s political drama: the Prime Minister of the small island nation (Macha Grenon), a professional mediator (Emily VanCamp), and a young and idealistic novice MP from Canada (Nathalie Doummar). This is followed by a series of tracking and static shots that situate the opening action on a ferry between Canada and Besco. The narrative closes with the Canadians returning via the same route. Thus, for the duration of this film bookended by passages through aquatic border spaces, the women will position themselves within a literally and figuratively uneasy in-between space that forces them to interrogate their personal and professional limits. The narrative draws our attention to political borders and the roles played by diplomacy, policy, and natural resources in the ways that those borders are approached, enforced, and narrated in political and national discourses. The fictional setting of Pays arguably encourages us to view these issues globally rather than specifically and Robichaud has stated that many of the issues it addresses are applicable to any territory (Ramond, 2016). Yet it is also difficult to

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not read the imbalanced relationship between Besco, a small nation of 170,000 inhabitants experiencing a financial crisis, and their larger and more prosperous neighbor as more specifically symbolic of Quebec’s positioning in Canada or of Canada’s rapport with the United States (Baud, 2016). Because (francophone) Canada and the fictional Besco are not culturally, ethically, or linguistically different, the negotiation over boundaries in Pays is primarily about ethics and national values, often presented through the individual perspectives of the three main women protagonists and their own processes of positioning. The plot centers on the negotiations between the Canadian delegation and Besco’s government over mining rights on the island, as well as the various related campaigns being waged simultaneously by the local union and a mining conglomerate. This entails a constant process of (re)positioning: drawing the natural and figurative lines for resource extraction, negotiating the limits between political and ethical or environmental considerations, enacting national foreign policy, and, in the process, establishing or undermining the expressed ideals of the nation. Félixe, the primary focus of narrative attention among the three central women, becomes disillusioned with her government’s hardline approach that is driven by corporate interests above all and to her resembles an exploitative colonial policy. Of course, although Pays situates these exploitative neocolonial machinations across a (fictional) external border, the similarity and proximity to Canada and a certain genericness of Besco as a minor francophone island suggests a connection to the exploitation of resources on Indigenous territory within the boundaries of Quebec and Canada. Language is another object of border positioning in Pays. Although the filming location is in Newfoundland, the fact that its official language is French aligns Besco with Quebec and means that the mediation also takes place in French. Emily Price, who mediates between the two camps, is played by native anglophone Emily VanCamp, who learned French in an immersion school growing up in Ontario (Cooper, 2016). In her role she is constantly shifting from professional duties in French to personal phone conversations in English, sometimes mixing both in discussions that blur those boundaries (including one I will discuss below). These ideas about politics, culture, values, language, and (the history of) colonialism are reinforced by the setting of the mediation session in a disused elementary school building. The confluence of these concepts is suggested in the mise-en-scène of the meetings. The primary hearing takes place in the gym, with the tables and flags of the respective delegations

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Fig. 1.3: Pays

laid out around the middle of the court. As in Une colonie, Pays draws on the ubiquitous and familiar lines of demarcation and ordering found in schools to make associations with the boundaries that inflect the wider world and its structuring systems, which are of course not unrelated to the state-supported system of education. The mediator’s opening instructions are spoken as she looms over the half court line of the gym, each delegation and their respective flag watching from their own side of the court. Group sessions are held in smaller spaces, such as classrooms. In one, Rivest, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs (Rémy Girard), speaks pedantically about “Canadian values” against the backdrop of disused textbooks and a map on the wall of Canada’s eastern seaboard. Despite repeated suggestions that he sit, standing amidst a room of seated interlocutors, the minister is suggestive of a pedagogue as he delivers his pitch for Besco to accept the terms of the Canadian offer. If Canada may be the authority figure in one potential reading of the scholastic symbolism of the setting, the images of pedagogical tools are also connected to the concept of national indoctrination in general. The negotiations coincide with Besco’s national holiday and the Besconian politicians in the school also partake in scenes of collective celebration that show how national narratives and the boundaries that they invoke—be they implicit or explicit, geographic or ideational—are performed both individually and collectively. The rigid geometric lines of pedagogical settings are complemented by recurring images of natural and geographic points, particularly along the island’s rugged coast. As I already noted, Pays opens and closes with visuals of the liminal spaces of coast, water, and ferry docks. In between,

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the film is punctuated with often static, postcard-like vignettes of the rugged shore, homes, fishing boats, and mining or port settings. The setting becomes a character of its own (Baud, 2016), imposing itself in our mental landscape of fictional Besco. Robichaud describes cultivating a sense of place that is familiar to Quebec audiences yet still unique through a focus on space shot in distinctive 35 millimeter that lends the film what the director calls a 1970s look. Landscapes are also reflected in the production design in elements such as a waterfall emblazoned on a vending machine and landscape photos adorning the walls of hotel rooms (Lizotte, 2017). A spatial imaginary also permeates the language of Pays. On the ferry voyage to Besco, Minister Rivest advises Félixe cryptically to be wary of the island, for although it is a beautiful country, landscape (paysage) is not everything. Later, after Félixe crosses paths with Emily in a bar (seemingly the bar in Besco), they have a bilingual conversation that quickly breaches the initial stated limitations of their professional relationship. They agree to drink in proximity but not together, or “de boire chacune de notre côté,” a phrasing that recalls the demarcation lines drawn on the gym floor or border lines on a political map. They are soon drinking shots and deep in conversation. When Félixe expresses disillusion with her own government’s position and practices, the mediator creates a bilingual, geographically inspired aphorism that neither seem to fully comprehend: “Maybe it’s not so much what position you take in your country, but rather the position that you take in your life. Tu es ta propre péninsule [you are your own peninsula].” Neither the minister’s nor the mediator’s spatially tinged maxims are entirely clear, but they may both suggest that individual positioning and interpretation is more important than political or geographic contours. Indeed, throughout the six films discussed here, ideas and narratives of boundaries are more important than physical border lines, demonstrating that it is in fact not only the paysages that count. Applying this more broadly to the film itself, the landscapes within Pays can be seen as reflections on the contours of Quebec cinema within Canada and the world and the double positioning of a director who, as if on a peninsula, aims towards making a film for domestic and (at least select) global consumption. It is fitting, then, that the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, highlighting its overlapping yet not parallel designations as Canadian and Québécois (for more on Robichaud’s career, see Chapter 3 by Ylenia Olibet).

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Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre: Mapping the Internal Transnational The satirical political road movie Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (Philippe Falardeau, 2014) imagines new lines within and beyond a map of Quebec and Canada. Guibord is Falardeau’s sixth feature and his oeuvre demonstrates an interest in Quebec’s place in the world and in other, “outsider” perspectives on life in Quebec. To this end, Congorama (2006, Canada/France/Belgium) brings a Belgian man (Olivier Gourmet) with a Congolese wife to the backroads of Quebec to learn that he was actually born in la belle province. Monsieur Lazhar (2011) recounts the experience of an Algerian asylum seeker (Mohamed Fellag) who fills in as a substitute teacher at a Montreal elementary school. Both question prevalent conceptions of (national) identity. Guibord, as the name suggests, primarily espouses the perspective of the titular protagonist, a Federal MP (Patrick Huard) serving a fictional riding in Quebec’s northern Abitibi region (more about that later). However, Falardeau also makes an important addition in the form of a young Haitian political intern named Souverain (Irden Exantus). Guibord approaches the link between space and identity in a fashion similar to Congorama, which brings together and recenters a trio of cinematic margins and “productively interrogates our individual and collective place within the postcolonial world” (Schilt, 2018, 210). Quebec’s vast spaces make it a particularly cinegenic setting for road films (194), and as in Congorama, Falardeau deploys in Guibord many of the common elements of the road movie in general and the quest subcategory in particular to examine the complexities of a vast, isolated swath of northern Quebec. By mapping transnational questions onto a seemingly remote and inward-looking territory, Guibord exemplifies Thibaut Schilt’s observation that contemporary Québécois road films: look simultaneously inward, offering a window into the lives of Quebec’s current inhabitants within its borders, and outward, borrowing from a now international genre on the one hand, and pondering how 21st century global human movements may shape the future of the francophone province on the other. (194)

The Haitian Souverain offers a vantage point that is simultaneously that of the outsider and of a shared French intellectual and democratic tradition in which Souverain is better versed than the Canadian Guibord. On one level, Souverain is an impassioned follower and astute observer of Canadian politics who recounts by Skype the political intrigue into

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which Guibord has unwittingly fallen to a growing crowd of friends, family, and interested onlookers in Port-au-Prince. Thus, the internship offers a vantage point on Canadian politics and Québécois culture described by Souverain in the film and Falardeau in interviews as the “South” observing the “North,” a twist on the common practice of election monitoring (Siag, 2015). The young Haitian is well-educated and highly informed about the colonial history of Canada that is taught in the classroom of Une colonie, but also brings his own critical reading to it. He introduces himself to Guibord and to viewers by offering a brief but comprehensive discourse on Canadian government and the “discovery” of Canada on behalf of France by Jacques Cartier before adding in conclusion that Cartier did not in fact “discover” anything given that the land was already inhabited. On another level, Souverain approaches Canadian politics and democracy from firmly within the parameters of its intellectual traditions. He often cites Enlightenment thinkers, feeds Guibord quotes from Rousseau for the media, and hatches a “direct democracy” plan that puts the MP on the road to solicit his constituents’ advice on how to cast a tie-breaking vote on whether Canada should join a war in an unnamed Middle Eastern nation. This is a good point to note the lightly satirical bent of the film, which is generated primarily by the contrast between Guibord and Souverain and a general derision towards how Canadian federal politics functions. The film’s title is adapted from an 18th-century anti-British burlesque folk song that was very popular in France, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre.” Falardeau, who is not generally known as a comedic director, drew on the assistance of Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur on Guibord’s comedic dialogue, resulting in a film that sometimes has a bit of the dark and laconic strain of humor featured in the “New Wave” of Quebec cinema with which Lafleur is associated (Siag, 2015). The satirical bite is muted by the earnestness and genuine folksy appeal of Guibord the individual and politician. If he is well out of his element in the high-stakes politics of war and peace, Falardeau spares him the sharper digs aimed at Canadian politics in general and a wily but shallow Stephen Harper look-alike Prime Minister. Guibord’s persona is situated at the nexus of national and provincial identity and narratives (or myths). Guibord is a former amateur hockey star and national hero remembered for his role in Canada’s victory over Russia in a junior world championship match. Hockey, Canada’s national sport, is the source of Guibord’s fame and the root of his popular appeal, but it is also related to what makes him a figure of ridicule. We learn that

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Guibord’s professional career quickly ended due to his debilitating fear of flying, rendering him a failure in the national pastime and making his life as a politician much more difficult on occasions when he must travel to and from Ottawa. In addition to being an imperfect Canadian hero onscreen, the casting of Patrick Huard also places Guibord within a pantheon of Québécois popular cinema stars. It would surely be difficult for audiences in Quebec to watch Huard as Guibord without thinking of his role in the local box office sensation Bon Cop, Bad Cop, one of Quebec cinema’s greatest commercial successes of this century. Huard’s persona as Guibord is different and certainly significantly toned down from the role he played in that action movie, in which detectives from Ontario and Quebec are brought together to investigate a murder after a body is found on the boundary line between those provinces. However, the link between Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Guibord provided by a hockey plotline is reinforced by a familiar buddy pairing that is prevalent in comedies (Siag, 2015), which Falardeau chose to reprise. The cross-border duo from Bon Cop, Bad Cop, with Colm Feore as Huard’s Ontarian foil, is reworked here to pair Guibord with the Haitian Souverain, who is very much his opposite (see Chapter 5 by Stéfany Boisvert in this volume for more on the film). The Souverain-Guibord pairing follows some familiar patterns—such as rapprochement between the initially mismatched characters—but ultimately serves a different purpose in the quest road movie format than it would in a buddy cop comedy. Notably, Souverain’s very presence in the landscape and culture that he and Guibord must traverse in the course of their direct democracy mission facilitates a remapping of Canadian and Québécois space and of Québécois cinema. Guibord would seem to reject the notion put forward in Pays that it is “not just the landscape that counts.” However, a closer examination reveals a vision of place that is not firmly aligned with political mapping of territory. Souverain observes to his followers in Haiti that in Canada “politics is a question of space and territory.” An important strand of the narrative is premised on the necessity of Guibord crossing large spaces, due to the sheer vastness of Quebec and of Guibord’s riding (three times the size of Haiti, as Souverain points out). The voyages are filmed with a familiar mix of traveling montages composed of aerial shots of the vehicle immersed in the vast space of Abitibi and interior shots as the duo talk in the car. The progress through the fictional towns that Falardeau mapped onto the real Abitibi is marked by road signs that remind us of the enormous scale of the MP’s district. Driving scenes are introduced

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Fig. 1.4: Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre

using classical cinematic animated maps that viewers might associate with films such as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942, USA). Guibord deploys maps not only to chart progress (and a lack thereof), but also in a similar symbolic fashion to what we have seen in previous examples. Indeed, Falardeau takes the most direct approach to the use of maps onscreen as an ontological invitation aligned with Conley’s theory of “cartographic cinema” (2007). Guibord opens with a camera moving in slowly from a long shot of a large political map—resembling the kind found in classrooms—of Canada affixed to a wall. The camera slowly zooms in, quaking unsteadily to the beat of Billy May’s “Bo Mambo” until it fixes upon a finger pointing out the region where the action will take place. Mambo seems an incongruous sonic pairing for a map of Canada, but as the details of the map demonstrate, place can always be declined in complex ways. Aside from a foray into the national capital across the Ottawa River and a brief scene showing Souverain back in Haiti at the end (before returning to help with Guibord’s reelection), the narrative space is physically limited to Quebec. However, the nomenclature of the fictional comté that Guibord serves—“Prescott, Makadewà, Rapides-aux-Outardes”—represents complex (if often unseen) elements that go into the demarcation of space and identity and exemplifies Laforest’s observation that Quebec is “awash with implicit borders and blurry thresholds, making for a multitude of difficult passages inside the official borders of the province” (2019, 213). Prescott, an invented town name, presumably refers to Robert Prescott, a late 18th-century governor of British North America whose name now adorns a gate in the walls of Quebec City’s old town. Outarde is the French word for Canada goose, a species known for its common patterns of seasonal migration between the sub-Arctic and the southern US, making

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them not entirely Canadian even if inevitably associated with the nation due to their name. Makadewà means “black” in Algonquin, a recognition of that First Nation’s presence in the territory but also a wink at Souverain’s seemingly unusual presence in the region (and in Canadian politics). Aside from one brief encounter on the streets of remote Prescott, the Haitian man is the only Black individual shown in Canada in the film. The novelty of his presence is underlined by two playful juxtapositions. Souverain stares awkwardly at the other Black person he encounters in Abitibi until Guibord’s daughter asks ironically if he’s “never seen a Black person.” In a comedic mise-en-scène at the Prime Minister’s residence, Souverain waits under a portrait of Queen Elizabeth posing next to the Canadian flag and the Prime Minister’s daughter asks him if he is the new driver. The implicit racism of the query also acknowledges the lack of representation of Blacks in Canadian politics and in conceptions of national identity. Yet the inclusion of “black” in the invented county’s name also points to complex webs of affinity and belonging. Quebec is home to at least 120,000 individuals of Haitian origin, 85 percent of whom live in or near Montreal (Ministère de l’Immigration, 2011). What’s more, the droll placement of Souverain below the souveraine of the Commonwealth that counts over thirty member nations in Africa and the Caribbean shows that Quebec is one component of a global affiliation whose history is winked at by the name of the fictional town of Prescott.7 Most importantly, the imagined names of Guibord’s district are components of a map of Canada that—as the shaky framing of the opening scene foretells—are not immutable and cannot be encapsulated by a traditional cartographic representation of solid colors surrounded by definitive lines. The roads of the county are riddled with a series of blockades, the product of dueling protests by the Algonquin community and local truckers, that are constantly remaking the route that Guibord must navigate to reach locales in his riding. To make it to Ottawa in time to cast a crucial vote, Guibord asks for an Algonquin leader’s help in charting a course on a map that avoids a roadblock by using a canoe to travel downriver. Val d’Or in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, where Guibord was filmed, is more than 400 kilometers from Montreal, the hub of Quebec’s cinema industry but in is its own right an important location on the map of Quebec film. Abitibi is a cinematic and cinephilic region. It is the setting of numerous films, including La donation (Bernard Émond, 2009), La chasse au Godard d’Abbittibbi (Éric Morin, 2013), and Le peuple invisible (Robert Monderie and Richard Desjardins, 2007). The region also hosts the Festival du cinéma international en

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Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Falardeau’s remapping of Quebec works to undermine a prevalent dichotomous outlook on the province that posits the static rural as a contrast to the dynamic and more diverse urban. The act of drawing new lines on the (re)imagined lines of a map of Quebec aptly symbolizes what each of the six films that I have discussed here are doing on some level. Be they internal or external borders, these films exemplify the capacity of cinema to face, interrogate, and reimagine lines of demarcation. They also acknowledge the idea that maps and borders are narrative tools. In Guibord this is literal. The animated route mapping is an important component of the film’s narrative structure, and the maps are being drawn both as a way to orient the audience and connect the scenes in a coherent fashion. Conclusion In my analysis of these six films, I have pointed out how onscreen positioning draws our attention to the prevalence of the internal and— frequently implicitly—external borders of Quebec. Collectively these films cover many of the common border situations and questions facing Quebec and the Québécois. Being attentive to borders and maps onscreen helps us reimagine the cinematic output and infrastructure of Quebec in the complex ways that Bill Marshall suggests in his call for remappings. In terms of what these collectively say about identity, it is notable that my examples, made between 2014 and 2020, advance the trend of “intercultural” Quebec cinema identified by Bachand (2008, 57). However, as I briefly noted in the context of Le meilleur pays du monde, they diverge from the other prominent trope that Bachand points out, that of relations between fathers and sons. Families are prominent in all but one of the narratives (Pays), but no father–son relationships are shown onscreen. Instead, we have key mother–son and father–daughter pairings as well as fatherlike relationships (in Le meilleur pays du monde) nurtured by choice. Broadly speaking, the family often serves as a particularly durable metaphor for the nation and national identity in cinema. Ideas of genealogical proximity, biological and terrestrial lineage, and protection from ostensibly nefarious outside contagions are particularly germane to this symbolism. As the smallest unit of the nation or community, the family is also the primary locus of the everyday elaboration and construction of the community’s borders. In this sense, families function as micro-borders, where the parameters

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of identity and filiation are constantly tested, resisted, and remade in the course of everyday life. These films, by updating how we perceive filiality and lineage, propose more flexible notions of family trees and their links to the nation and beyond. More nuanced maps of the nation must encompass more flexible conceptions of the family tree (itself a “map” of sorts) and of the way that identity is (re)produced. Not only do these films collectively generate new mental maps of the province and its cinematic landscape, the backstories of their creation demonstrate the increasing complexity of Québécois cinema. These films represent varied positions within and in relation to Quebec: from immigrant (Bensaddek) and second-generation (Le Duc) directors to a collaboration between a settler director and Indigenous communities (Dulude-De Celles) and an “emigrant” from Quebec who continues to work within as well as beyond the Quebec cinematic apparatus (Cousineau), and collaborations between Cousineau and her Inuk codirector Ivalu (see Chapter 2 by Karine Bertrand). Examined together, these six films demonstrate how the ecosystem of Quebec cinema functions as a borderland, a space of translation and exchange, forging new positions between reimagined local and reoriented global frameworks while remaining anchored to the institutions that fund and promote the province’s cinema. Much like the characters onscreen, perceptive viewers must think critically about how these films are positioned within and in relation to our existing mental maps of cinema. Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. “Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema.” Global Cinema Networks. Eds. Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Bachand, Denis. “Le prisme identitaire du cinéma québécois. Figures paternelles et interculturalité dans Mémoires affectives et Littoral.” Cinémas 19.1 (2008): 57–73. Baud, Hélène. “Pays.” 24 Images (15 December 2016). Bertrand, Karine. “Canadian Indigenous Cinema: From Alanis Obomsawin to the Wapikoni Mobile.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 105–124. Clark, Cath. “A Colony Review—Kisses and Cliches in Tender Comingof-Age Debut.” Guardian (8 March 2021). https://www.theguardian.

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com/film/2021/mar/08/a-colony-review-kisses-and-cliches-in-tendercoming-of-age-debut. Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cooper, Julia. “Filming Boundaries, Actress Emily VanCamp Felt Free to ‘Surrender.’” The Globe and Mail (17 November 2016). Czach, Liz and André Loiselle, eds. Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020. Eder, Klaus. “Europe’s Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe.” European Journal of Social Theory 9.2 (2006): 255–271. Fassin, Dider. “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries: The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 213–226. Gott, Michael. French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and “New Europe”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. ——. Interview with Ky Nam Le Duc, 29 March 2022. Graziano, Manlio. What Is a Border? Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018. Groguhé, Marissa. “Le meilleur pays du monde: imaginer le pire.” La Presse (28 August 2021). Guenther, Beatrice. “Transcultural Film in Québec: North African Diasporas in Bachir Bensaddek’s Montréal la Blanche and Raed Hammoud’s Documentaries on Daech.” Québec Studies 72.1 (2021): 119–140. Irwin, Robert. “Reserves in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia (2022). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-reserves. Laforest, Daniel. “The Emotional Geographies of Quebecois Cinema.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 213–228. Lévesque, François. “Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, de Sorel à la Berlinale.” Le Devoir (26 January 2019). https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/ cinema/546352/genevieve-dulude-de-celles-de-sorel-a-la-berlinale. Lizotte, Chloe. “Interview: Chloé Robichaud.” Film Comment (24 March 2017). https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-chloe-robichaud/. Mackenzie, Scott and Anna Westerstål Stenport. “Arnait Video Productions: Inuit Women’s Collective Filmmaking, Coalitional Politics, and a Globalized Arctic.” Camera Obscura 31.3 (2016): 153–163. ——. “The Polarities and Hybridities of Arctic Cinemas.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 125–146. Marshall, Bill. “Quebec Cinema as Global Cinema.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 251–268.

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——. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Martínez-Zalce, Graciela. “Canadian Cinema and Its Borders.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 165–181. Michael, Charlie. “Behind Closed Doors: Monsieur Lazhar and the Francophone Classroom Film.” Québec Studies 561 (2013): 29–40. Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration. “Enquête nationale auprès des ménages de 2011 Haïtienne.” 2011. New, W. H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. Ramond, Charles-Henri. “Pays—film de Chloé Robichaud.” Films du Québec (8 November 2016). https://www.filmsquebec.com/films/pays-chloerobichaud/. Rankin, William. After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the 20th Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Santoro, Miléna. “The Rural (Re)Turns of Young Protagonists in Contemporary Quebec Films.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020, 149–180. Schilt, Thibaut. “An Ostrich, a Backhoe and a Few Ski-Doos: Tracking the Road Movie in Quebec and Beyond.” Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Eds. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 192–215. Siag, Jean. “Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre: le paradoxe du politician.” La Presse (28 September 2015). Statistics Canada. “Immigration et diversité ethnoculturelle—Faits saillants en tableaux” (2016). https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/ dp-pd/hlt-fst/imm/Tableau.cfm?Lang=F&T=31&Geo=24. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

Notes 1. Although some prefer to use the term “community” rather than “reserve,” I opted to employ the latter because the physical boundaries of the reserve are constantly referenced in the film. What I discuss is therefore a spatial demarcation before an ideational one. A community is not of course limited to a reserve, but in this instance I am referring explicitly to the parameters of the reserve as shown in the film.

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2. Dulude-De Celles’s project collaborations include editing Batailles, a 2016 short by Karen Pinette Fontaine. Dulude-De Celles contends that the connection between Mylia and Jimmy was inspired by her work with Wapikoni Mobile: “J’ai collaboré avec le Wapikoni mobile pendant quatre ans, explique Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. Le principe consiste à envoyer des cinéastes travailler avec de jeunes Autochtones pour tourner avec eux des courts métrages. J’ai fait cinq escales, c’est-à-dire que j’ai séjourné cinq mois dans différentes communautés. Ç’a été marquant pour moi, formateur. J’ai énormément appris sur eux. Et j’ai énormément appris sur moi. Bref, j’ai voulu incarner l’Autre, avec un A majuscule, de cette manière-là. Jimmy a pris forme comme ça, de façon très naturelle”; see https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/ cinema/546352/genevieve-dulude-de-celles-de-sorel-a-la-berlinale. 3. Reserves have a complex status as territory, which is to some degree expressed by the signage and the map discussed here. Reserves are not strictly speaking owned by the Indigenous community, but are held in trust by the government. Moreover, the majority of Indigenous people in Canada do not live on reserves and some communities do not have reserves (see Irwin, 2011). 4. For instance, Cath Clark’s (2021) review in the Guardian characterizes the film as “a calm and tender portrait of a shy 12-year-old as she yo-yos between childhood and adolescence. It is beautifully acted and full of emotional complexity, although at times the storytelling seems a little derivative, with scenes half-familiar from indie’s back catalogue of coming-of-age movies.” 5. In the 2016 census, Quebec counted almost 200,000 residents who identified as Maghrebi, including 60,000 Algerians; see Statistics Canada (2016). 6. Pays is officially listed as a coproduction between Quebec and Newfoundland. It received support from the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation and involved the participation of the St. John’s, Newfoundland-based production company Morag Loves Company. 7. The image of Souverain beneath the Queen also points to the irony of his name. The young Haitian is profoundly interested in and committed to pure forms of democracy.

chapter two

Arnait Video Productions and the Fictional Work of the Inuit/ Québécois Collective Karine Bertrand Arnait Video Productions The question of identity is present throughout Quebec cinema’s history, reflecting the ongoing “feelings of precarity which are connected to certain global issues of Québécois society,” thus making the 7th art a “powerful revealer of social tendencies and transformations and a tool for political questioning” in Quebec (Poirier, 2004, 2). On this subject, in a 2008 essay, Quebec cinema specialist Denis Bachand declared that interculturality was one of the two most prevalent tendencies in Québécois film production of the 21st century, the other being the father–son relationship (2008, 57). Because interculturality refers to “the existence and equitable interaction of diverse cultures and the possibility of generating shared cultural expressions through dialogue and mutual respect” (UNESCO, 2023), it is considered to be an important vector of Quebec identity and Quebec cinema, as they are both considered to occupy a minor position in the wider North American film culture and landscape. Indeed, the survival of the Québécois nation depends on “otherness” as a way to constantly reaffirm itself despite it being a minority nation within North America. This is clear from the early cinéma direct films of the 1960s, in which Jewish (Le chat dans le sac/ The Cat in the Bag, Gilles Groulx, 1964) and Haitian identities (À tout prendre/All Things Considered, Claude Jutra, 1963) were investigated in parallel to the French Canadians living their own révolution tranquille [quiet revolution], to the postmodern explorations of real and imagined hybrid identities in films such as Léolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992) and Littoral (Tideline, Wajdi Mouawad, 2003). However, for many decades, representations of diversity in Quebec cinema placed Indigenous “subjects” in a peculiar space, portraying

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mostly male Indigenous characters as a mirror reflecting the condition of the oppressed French-Canadian man, searching to break free from English domination and redefining himself through Amerindian roots and connections to the territory. Moreover, many representations of Indigenous peoples reflected the social and political preoccupations of the filmmakers themselves; for example, Pierre Perrault’s quest to define what it means to live in the “country Quebec” (le pays Québec) in Le goût de la farine (The Taste of Flour, 1977) and Le mouchouanipi ou le pays de la terre sans arbre (The Land without Trees or the Mouchouanipi, 1980) and Robert Morin’s constant depiction of oppressed subjects (Le n…/The N…, 2002; Journal d’un coopérant, 2010) including Indigenous youth (3 histoires d’Indiens/3 Indian Tales, 2014). Fortunately, in the last five to ten years, we have witnessed the emergence and growing popularity of Indigenous representations that are made in close collaborations with communities, as well as Indigenous cinemas, which tend to reflect the political and social climate of a province spending more time questioning its role as a colonizer,1 all the while refusing to recognize the presence of systemic racism in Quebec institutions. In the wider cultural sphere, playwright Robert Lepage found himself in the middle of a controversy in 2018 when he chose to have Indigenous roles played by settler actors. The discussions around this topic and the pressure that is being put on artists thus play a role in redesigning the contours of an industry and an art form advocating for more diversity and collaboration in the elaboration of heterogenous film landscapes, bringing filmmakers to explore identity and nation following new ethical (production modes) and aesthetic (narration, themes, etc.) criteria (Bertrand and Baillargeon, 2023). In this light, collaborations between Québécois filmmakers and diverse Indigenous Nations and communities living on Turtle Island have allowed new and creative works to emerge, and where the filmmaker’s identity, personal beliefs, and aesthetic style are put forward by presenting what Bill Marshall calls “The Indigenous Other” (2001). This can be seen, for example, in Benoît Pilon’s Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life, 2008) and Iqaluit (2016). In Ce qu’il faut pour vivre, Pilon demonstrates, as Perrault had done in Le goût de la farine, the difficulties of connecting on a deeper level with an individual and/or a community when, as the direct cinema filmmaker clearly expressed: “within the first moments we met, we understood that we were not equals […] our pockets are full of mirrors, which we will use to achieve our objectives” (Perrault, 1985, 280). Documentary

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filmmaker Arthur Lamothe was able to achieve a better communication with the Innu people of Quebec’s Côte Nord by establishing with them a relationship of trust that stood the test of time, as is evident in his epic documentary film Mémoire battante (1983). Yet it is only recently that Quebec filmmakers have chosen to put forward Indigenous cultures and identities and to let themselves be influenced by the unique and diverse cultures and storytelling traditions of some of the eleven First Nations of Quebec, as well as the Inuit of Nunavik and Nunavut, leaving more space for narratives and aesthetics to emerge (Avant les rues/Before the Streets, Chloé Leriche, 2016; Kuessipan, Myriam Verreault, 2019). This is especially the case of Marie-Hélène Cousineau’s work with Arnait Video Productions, a collective cofounded in 1991 by Cousineau (Québécoise) and Inuit women of Igloolik, who have used video as a political and cultural tool, allowing Inuit women’s voices to be recorded for present and future generations who are eager to learn more about their culture. Founded thirty years ago in Nunavut, Arnait, whose motto is “women helping women,” have been indigenizing the Québécois and Canadian film landscape through sharing Inuit stories and intergenerational knowledge transmission onscreen (and in Inuktitut). The Elders, executive producers, directors, and actors Madeline Ivalu and Susan Avingaq thus inspired a new generation of talents, such as producer and writer Lucy Tulugarkuk, “who has been involved in filmmaking for almost 20 years as an actress (Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner, Maïna), assistant-director to Zacharias Kunuk, makeup artist, casting director and television host” (Arnait website). Although it is legitimate to ask ourselves if it is relevant to include Indigenous films produced in Quebec as a category of Quebec cinema, in the case of Arnait, whose cofounder is Québécoise and some of whose films have been shot in northern Quebec (Nunavik), I believe this is a great opportunity to showcase Arnait’s decolonizing work and the ways in which the collaboration between Inuit women and Marie-Hélène Cousineau leaves much space to what Zacharias Kunuk calls doing things from an “Inuk point of view.” Because many articles and book chapters have already been written on the Igloolik-based collective’s work (Bertrand, 2017; Morton and Sirove, 2015; Mackenzie and Stenport, 2016; Chisholm, 2016; Bertrand, 2019), I asked Marie-Hélène Cousineau which topics she would like discussed in this particular text on the Arnait video collective of Inuit women. Throughout our conversation, which revolved around the subject of what she calls the Arnait trilogy (Before Tomorrow,

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2009; Uvanga, 2013; Restless River, 2019), questions of mixed identity, interculturality, and relationships between tradition and modernity/ technology in connection to different eras of colonization kept coming back, as they remain at the center of these fictional narratives. Moreover, for the last three years, Queen’s University has been collaborating with the collective, preserving, remediating, and digitizing parts of their archive, which consists of filmed footage (interviews, sound, behindthe-scenes takes, etc.) in various formats, as well as other items such as hand-drawn storyboards, a family tree, and pictures. This close collaboration with the collective meant giving them full power over the content and finding out how we can help transfer and preserve it. It also meant having Madeline Ivalu and Susan Avingaq in Kingston, Ontario, and spending much time translating the metadata, agreements, etc. into Inuktitut, in order for the Elders to understand and be implicated every step of the way. Working with the collective has definitely helped to shed new light on the works that are made and how they come to life. Therefore, I suggest in this chapter, in the first instance, an overview of collaborative works made between Québécois (women) filmmakers and Indigenous communities. This short section will allow us to better demonstrate how interculturality is developed through what Cree author Shawn Wilson (2008) calls relationality. The core of this chapter will, however, focus on the Arnait trilogy, starting with Before Tomorrow (2008), a tale of survivance through storytelling, and continuing our journey with Uvanga (2013) and Restless River (2019), two works which deal directly with the themes of hybrid identities, intercultural encounters, and collaborations. This overview will be inspired by an interview done with Marie-Hélène Cousineau in August 2021 in Kingston, a transcription of which appears at the end of this volume. The integration of excerpts from this interview will allow a clearer understanding of Arnait’s mission and of its multiple forms of collaboration with Inuit and non-Inuit cast and crew; issues in regard to language and translation; the archiving of Arnait’s material at Queen’s University; and the new aesthetics born of these collaborations. Because the Elders, Madeline and Susan, are hard to reach in Igloolik, I will borrow information from previous interviews to integrate their point of view on the collective and its work. Finally, the wonderful book Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True (2017) edited by Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik, will serve as a guide post, enriching our knowledge of Inuit culture and of its representation in the more recent fictional works made by the collective.

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The Emergence of Collaborative Works in Quebec: Women Indigenizing the Screen Surprisingly, in the December 2019 special issue of Quebec film magazine 24 Images celebrating the last decade of films in a transnational context, none of the 168 pages discussed Indigenous cinemas and its development. Yet, when looking back at the years 2009–2019, it is hard to ignore the blossoming of Indigenous cinemas, led by women creators, who, in Canada alone, make up more than 90 percent of Indigenous filmmakers. Inspired by matriarch Alanis Obomsawin (Abénaki), who has been making documentary films for fifty-three years now, artists such as Sonia Bonspille Boileau (Mohawk), Kim O’bomsawin (Abénaki), Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe), and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Inuk) have assailed the Québécois film landscape, many times working collaboratively with actors and crews hailing from different nations and identities. Boileau’s two feature-length fiction films, Le dep (2014) and Rustic Oracle (2019), are perfect examples of nations (Innu, Mohawk, Algonquin, Québécois) intersecting and of the interpenetration of different cultures that have ensured their survival by keeping a balance between assimilation and conservation of tradition (Kattan, 1996, 37). For these women filmmakers, this means perhaps indigenizing the film medium through the integration of storytelling and testimonies, to raise their voices, educate the population, and to criticize a system in which colonialism is still alive and well. Of course, in the case of the Québécois intersecting with Indigenous nations, there remains an imbalance in terms of power relations, and the role of colonizer needs to be fully recognized and integrated by the Québécois in order for better relationships to develop, beyond the racism and the longing for a connection to the ancestral territory of which Indigenous peoples are emblematic. In the same way, when settler/non-Indigenous filmmakers work with Indigenous individuals and communities, there is always the question of the filmmaker operating from a position of privilege and power, something that comes up frequently in articles about the Wapikoni Mobile, where Indigenous youth were trained mostly by non-Indigenous staff and professionals of the project (Bastien, 2016). In recent years, more Indigenous individuals have been involved with the Wapikoni training, and two Indigenous women—Odile Jonanette (Innu) and Véronique Rankin (Anishinaabe)—have insured leadership of the project in the last five years. Indirectly answering the question of Western influence,

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Kevin Papatie, an Anishinaabe filmmaker and Wapikoni participant, explained in an interview how the camera is for him a modern-day talking stick, a sacred object conferring the right to speak and used to get everyone around you to listen intently to what you have to say (Bertrand, 2011, 3). Furthermore, in the Wapikoni short film Territoire des ondes (Patrick Boivin and Alland Flamand, 2006), the Atikamekw filmmakers demonstrate how the radio is a more recent mode of communication imitating in a way the function of the tewekan (drum). Thus, by “indigenizing” not only the content of a film through stories and traditional knowledge, but also the tools that are used to tell these stories, Indigenous filmmakers are able to influence the medium of film. Similarly, when asked about the transfer of oral tradition onscreen versus using the spoken word to tell stories, the Arnait Elders (Susan Avingaq and Madeline Ivalu) suggest that the film medium is the best one to reach younger generations who can better relate to this format (Hopkins, 2019). Other filmmakers, such as Marie-Hélène Cousineau, have also answered the question of “who holds the power” by “describing the ways in which the Arnait collective operated, through collaboration between members who negotiated their shared production goals together. Cousineau clearly stated that she was simply one voice within a larger group of equal collaborators” (Morton and Sirove, 2015, 212). Therefore, it is perhaps through the development of meaningful, horizontal relationships that interculturality is able to express its essence, when it is understood as “making the best use of each culture, so there will be reciprocity, knowledge, appreciation, understanding, interaction, participation, horizontality, respect and solidarity with other cultures” (definition from Law Insider, n.d.). Keeping in mind the many insidious ways in which colonialism makes it hard to develop perfectly equal relationships, there are a few examples in Québécois cinema of what can be deemed “successful” intercultural relationships, and where fruitful alliances allowed for meaningful documentary and fiction films to be born. Looking back to 2008, filmmaker Marquise Lepage teamed up with Martha Flaherty, granddaughter of the famous Robert Flaherty, to produce a film, Martha of the North, mixing documentary and fiction on the displacement of Inuit communities in northern Quebec. Lepage uses Martha’s story and her grandfather’s footage from Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) to rewrite history and fill the gaps in Martha’s family narrative. It took Lepage two years to convince Martha of the importance of telling her story, and six years before the film was available to audiences.

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According to the filmmaker, the screening of the documentary generated overwhelming reactions from the people who had lived through the relocations, and the film became the primary reason why the government finally accepted to offer public apologies and recognize the damage that was done to the families who were separated from their land and relatives. Some of the elders even declared, once the film was out and their stories had been validated, that they felt they were ready to die in peace (Bertrand, 2017). More recently, Québécois filmmakers Chloé Leriche (Avant les rues, 2016) and Myriam Verreault (Kuessipan, 2019) have both developed close relationships with the Indigenous nations they chose to portray in their fiction films: the Atikamekw communities of Manawan, Wemotaci, and Obedjiwan for Leriche and the Innu of Uashat for Verreault, whose adaptation of Innu writer Naomi Fontaine’s novel Kuessipan (2011) demonstrates the importance of relationality when working with Indigenous creators. As explained by Cree author Shawn Wilson, relationality implies that “all things are related and therefore relevant” and “the relationship with something (a person, object or idea) is more important than the thing itself” (2008, 58, 73). It is indeed through these relationships, where cultures interpenetrate and the screen is “indigenized,” that true encounters (although imperfect) can occur. In Verreault’s Kuessipan, the representation of the precarious state of preservation versus openness to the other is shown through the relationship between Mikuan, a young Innu woman wanting to leave her community to go to college in Quebec City, and the young white man she falls in love with. Although both characters demonstrate the will to surrender to their emotions and to each other, the cultural abyss between their two very different worlds (language, upbringing, personal histories) proves to be too much for Francis, who parts ways with Mikuan after her brother’s untimely death. Nevertheless, despite showing the difficulties of intercultural relationships, the connection between the audience and the characters remains strong, perhaps because of what happens offscreen. Indeed, because of the rapport between writer and consultant Naomi Fontaine, the Innu community of Uashat welcomed filmmaker Verreault with open arms: “Myriam is the type of person we like, as Innu people, because she’s humble, and she’s an open person. She likes to create real relations with us. I never thought that she just took our story or drama or tragedy. She is a true person, which is really important for us Innu people” (Fontaine in Smith, 2019). In Chloé Leriche’s case, the filmmaker, who had worked with the Wapikoni Mobile for many years

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before, already had a relationship with the Atikamekw people before she started shooting her film. Although she wrote the screenplay and story by herself, the Atikamekw cast (all nonprofessional actors) were the ones translating the dialogues and story from French to Atikamekw, thus taking charge of the narrative in a way, and partially transforming its meaning through the structure and connotation of the language (Chagnon, 2016, 6). Because these close, and more or less successful, encounters are only minimally present in the works of Benoît Pilon, Yves Sioui Durand (Mesnak, 2011), and Robert Morin (the aforementioned 3 histoires d’Indiens, 2014), it seems to be that women are able to move beyond the political and ideological narratives to navigate images that tell personal and moving stories of “imperfect” but profoundly human encounters. On this topic, Armatage et al. argue that “Canadian women’s cinema must be seen as a relational practice, in dialogue with broader institutional and historical contexts of feminist and feminist films” (1999, 13) and Louise Carrière describes women’s cinema in Quebec as being exemplary of a practice “where women express their emotions and experiences, and where everyday life becomes a way to translate social relationships” (1983, 271). Moving beyond or perhaps adding another element to the valid “feminist” argument, Morton and Sirove advise, in their chapter on collaborations, following Rogoff’s suggestion that “we open up other emergent possibilities for the exchange of shared perspectives or insights or subjectivities—we allow for some form of emergent collectivity” (Rogoff in Morton and Sirove, 2015, 200). In the next section of this chapter, we will see that it is in fact these possibilities that are put forward in Arnait’s fiction films, through a work ethic that favors horizontal relationships, and where the landscape, language, and ways of navigating through life reflect Inuit women working together and helping each other. The Arnait Collective: Navigating Time, History, and Gender When looking at the history of colonization in the Canadian North, we must remember events such as the decimation of populations by infectious disease brought by the settlers, as well as linguistic and cultural assimilation, dislocation, the loss of a nomadic lifestyle closely linked to the culture, and the obligation to attend residential schools. These events make it hard to imagine how a culture and Nation is

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capable of survivance, a word used by Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor to describe the dynamic nature of Indigenous cultures and peoples, moving well beyond survival to construct new discourses of change, while keeping tradition alive (2008, 1). As expressed by the Inuit themselves, many of the problems faced by their communities “are the obvious results of this history and experience. Attempts to colonize both the lands and minds of Inuit has [sic] sometimes resulted in shame, confusion, cultural denial, loss of cultural identity and low self-esteem” (Katerak and Tester, 2017, 9). Perhaps one of the most damaging effects of colonialism is the imposition of a “Western” patriarchal system where the masculine domain is favored to the detriment of women, thus bringing about the dismantling of a way of life where ideas of sex and gender varied according to social norms and traditions such as eponym (naming a child in honor of a deceased ancestor and raising them in accordance with the ancestor’s gender). For the first time in Canada’s history, we live in a country where we have an Inuk woman—Mary Simon—nominated as Governor General. Furthermore, the formal acknowledgment of the wrongdoings of the state have now paved the way for a “reconciliation” of some sort (if conciliation there ever was) with the communities actively engaging in a long and fragile healing process. Situated at the heart of this long-term mission, Inuit women often work from the inside in order to rebuild intergenerational relationships, strengthen community ties, and allow for younger generations to learn traditional knowledge and listen to life lessons that are adapted to our times. Frank Tester and Joe Karetak explain why the use of the word “traditional” can be problematic, as it fixes Inuit knowledge and culture in a time which no longer exists, and in a context that may no longer be relevant to contemporary challenges: The problem with the word “traditional”, is that it implies something from the past, of limited value to living in the modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth. IQ [Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, ancestral Inuit knowledge] is about a set of values and practices, the relevance and importance of these, and ways of being and looking at things that are timeless. (2017, 1)

Reflecting on Arnait collective’s work of the past thirty years, it is easy to recognize how these women have integrated IQ and the four main malugarjuat [cultural laws] into both the filming process and the narratives that are shared with the audience.2 Using video to demonstrate the importance of Inuit women in the development and cohesion of

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social units and the (extended) family nucleus in the Arctic—past, present, and future—the films, interviews, television series, and special projects produced by the collective highlights the cultural specificity of Igloolik women. These projects also direct our attention towards the universal reach of questions related to motherhood and the upholding of the family unit and traditions, all of which are shown in the interviews with midwives as well as in the documentary films, such as Qulliq (1993), Piujuk and Angutautuq (1994), Ningiura (2000), Anaana (2001), and Traditional Clothing Inuit Style (2009). Beyond keeping the traditions and stories alive, the collective has also participated in an innovative project, Live from the Tundra, where technological tools (Internet, blogs, video pods, radio, satellite) contributed to building bridges between northern communities. More specifically, the participants in this project had access to a mobile media lab, the Nunatinnit Mobile Media Lab, where they could upload, on a daily basis, audio and video documents as well as photos and text messages that related their journey to the outside world, with the possibility of receiving feedback or engaging in discussions. Among other goals, this project’s aim was to explore the possibilities offered by technology as well as the desire to develop tools that would allow a more direct communication with the outside world; a wish that was granted to them in 2005, when a wireless Internet network was made accessible to the majority of communities (Soukup, 2006). Although I have mentioned it previously when writing about the adaptability of Indigenous peoples regarding technology, Karetak and Tester explain in a more precise way the relationship the Inuit have with technology, seen as a resource that is part of a harmonious and balanced life: Inuit believe that culture is about life. At the same time, Inuit need technology to provide better predictability. Inuit technology was reliant on the resources available in the environment. Although Inuit are highly adaptive and have harnessed new resources to improve their technologies, they have always maintained a keen sense of the interrelatedness of the environment as the source of resources that enable technologies to develop and improve the lives of people. (2017, 7–8)

In the same way, the feature-length documentary film Sol (Cousineau, Avingaq and Ivalu, 2014) deals with modern-day challenges related to the high suicide rate in northern communities—in Nunavut the suicide rate is ten times higher than the Canadian average—as well as violence, racism, and discrimination in the Arctic (Epstein, 2019). In

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“looking at things that are timeless as well as planning and preparing for the future,” which are part of the Inuit maligarjuat, the women of Arnait reiterate the importance of documenting a past that is “also caught in the trappings of patriarchal relations” (Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik, 2017, 3). The collective’s recent works demonstrate the tensions and possibilities of the present while upholding Inuit culture, offering the potential of transcending the patriarchal limitations of the past” (Mackenzie and Stenport, 2016, 158). Finally, more recently, Arnait’s fiction work has focused on questions of intercultural encounters and mixed identity connected to a history that reveals how technology has slowly insinuated itself into Inuit life, becoming a component of contemporary identity, revealing the clash between past and present, between Inuit and Qallunaat (non-Inuit). In Uvanga (Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu, 2014) and Restless River (Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu, 2019) we are shown, as is the case of both Leriche’s and Verreault’s feature-length films, the struggle faced by the young, having to carry tradition and fully integrate the contemporary world in order to be able to keep the culture and language alive. The Changing Landscapes of Identity in Before Tomorrow (2008), Restless River (2019), and Uvanga (2014) The Arnait trilogy offers an insider’s perspective on colonization and its consequences, exploring three important periods of colonization, which we will consider through a chronological reading of the narratives, and not the dates when the films were released. Perhaps one of the most evident traces of Arnait’s uniqueness is the way it places women and children as well as the family nucleus at the forefront of its feature works. In the first film of the Arnait trilogy, Before Tomorrow (2008), shot entirely in Inuktitut on the island of Igloolik, we experience the beautiful grandmother–grandson relationship of Ninioq (played by Madeline Ivalu, also codirector) and Maniq (played by Ivalu’s grandson, Paul-Dylan Ivalu), who are left to fend for themselves after their community is decimated by contaminated (Western) objects. Their love, warmth, and special bond are illustrated by the action of telling stories, which become a tool for survival and for hope. At first, it is Ninioq who teaches her grandson about the importance of community through the raven legend, and about survival and respect through the

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story of a young boy transformed into a snowbird after his grandmother had frightened him. Later in the film, Maniq becomes the storyteller, relating experiences he has had during his time alone hunting and trapping, or through his narration of what has happened to him and Ninioq. This unique bond demonstrates the desire of Ninioq to show her grandson that he is “able,” as she frequently tells him throughout the film, and illustrates the process of inunnguiniq for the Inuit, which means, according to Atuat Akittiq: “making a human being who will be able to help others with a good heart—someone with a good heart and mind who is always aware of their surroundings” (in Akittiq and Akpaliapik Karetak, 2017, 112). The film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Bjorn Riel (1975), is set at the time of first contacts, before colonization forever changed the landscape of Inuit life and culture, and when identity was firmly rooted in culture (language), in the territory, and the ties that bound people to one another. Throughout the narrative, the Arctic land is represented as an extension of the human body and soul, where the physical and spiritual dimensions of life and of people are expressed through duality—duality of elements (fire/water, earth/air/spirit, light/ darkness) and duality of movement (inside/outside, silence/speaking, movement/immobility, pain/pleasure). Furthermore, most of the scenes are shot and edited in a way that allows viewers to experience a time that is slower, for example with the camera following a character walking slowly towards us, without cutting the scene, following the rhythm of the landscape and of the people dancing to its beat. The land is indeed as much a part of the family as are individual people, Ninioq’s deceased husband, for example, symbolically appears to us through the element of water. As related by producer and set designer Susan Avingaq, all of the sets on Before Tomorrow are faithful to the way things used to be, to the objects and “tools we used to have near the tents” (Arnait Video Productions, 2009). Thus, although the beginning of the film presents a scene where the Inuit men share stories about meeting the intriguing “white man” and receiving useful objects from him in exchange for “a night with our women,” the curiosity the men and women show towards the “Other” and their interest in these tools that make their lives easier quickly disappears from the narrative, as it is these contaminated objects that eliminates the community almost entirely. Moving forward one hundred years or so, Restless River (2019) is set in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik—then Fort Chimo—in the 1950s, at a very specific time in Inuit history, when they were forced to abandon their

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nomadic lifestyle and live in settlements, becoming wards of the state. Once again inspired by a novel, La rivière sans repos (Windflower, 1970) by famous author Gabrielle Roy, the film’s script was written in English and parts of it were translated into Inuktitut (interview with Cousineau, Kingston, August 2021). The filming process involved a cast and crew from Quebec, Nunavik, and Nunavut, with two different dialects of Inuktitut spoken onscreen, as Madeline Ivalu preferred to use the Igloolik dialect (interview with Cousineau, Kingston, August 2021). In an interview with CTVM, Cousineau made it clear that it was her “work with the Elders of Arnait Video, and twenty-five years of close collaboration with Ivalu and Susan Avingaq” that allowed the filmmaker “to adapt the novel with confidence” (CTVM, 2019). Gabrielle Roy’s story of a young woman pregnant with an American soldier’s child was supposedly inspired by a short trip Roy had made to the North ten years earlier, where she saw an Inuk woman stroking her young child’s golden locks: “of this image was born the figure of a heroin named Elsa” caught in life’s many dramas, among which that of a “traditional civilization abruptly confronted to the values of modernity brought about by settlers from down South” (Ricard in Ramond, 2019). When asked about the main differences between the novel and the film, Cousineau spoke of the character Elsa. In the novel, the Inuk woman slowly starts to fall apart after her son chooses to leave without saying goodbye, whereas in the film, Elsa is a stubborn and bright woman, capable of adapting to life’s many challenges and changes, but still set on making up her own mind as to how to live her life (interview with Cousineau, Kingston, August 2019). Beautifully portrayed by actress/producer/television host Malaya Qaurniq Chapman, Elsa becomes, through Malaya’s interpretation, an example of how Inuit women are in everyday life: headstrong, resilient, and actively involved in every aspect of community and family life (Duchesne, 2013). While the book is very descriptive of characters, places, and actions, leaving no room for interpretation, the film rather suggests images that leave the audience more latitude to cocreate meaning that stems mainly from the landscape and the many metaphors present through nature’s elements. At the heart of the narrative, we can situate the restless and changing Koksoak River, Elsa’s alter ego, reflecting the turmoil and the quieter moments in her life. For example, we hear the murmur of the river when she encounters the American soldier; we see the river and its powerful waves when Elsa gives birth to her son Jimmy; we witness the river singing its joyful song when the young woman enjoys a picnic with

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her young son; we notice the calmness of the Koksoak when Jimmy leaves Fort Chimo and Elsa is left alone. In both the novel and the movie, the river also works as a symbolic barrier, as the “traditional” Inuk settlement is situated on one side and the modern settlement, where settlers also live, is on the other. Elsa’s identity is marked on screen by having her live on one side or the other of the Koksoak, depending on the life choices she makes, or the choices that life makes for her. Other than the river, the northern winds, snow storms, sea spray, and threatening skies, omnipresent during Elsa and Ian’s trip back to town, convey the opposition of and contrast between the harsh climate making life harder for the Inuit, and on the other side of the river, the hospitals, motor boats, and other technologies that are able to overcome the inconveniences of the weather and make life easier. The landscape of Before Tomorrow, untouched by civilization, thus becomes in this film tainted by modernity, technology and the advantages (for example, modern medicine) and disadvantages (loss of autonomy) it brings to the people and places it contaminates, inside and out. Through these powerful images, we understand the conflict between tradition and modernity, a conflict that is obviously written into the characters of Elsa and Jimmy (Harvey, 2017, 421). Indeed, because Jimmy is the product of two very different cultures situated on opposite sides of the fence (or here the river), and where value systems clash over subjects such as education, the relationship to the land, family, community, and technology, his relationship to his mother and his mother’s relationship to the outside world are obviously challenged

Fig. 2.1: Restless River

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in significant ways. Thus, Elsa, influenced by her child’s origins but also by the Qallunaat couple (a police officer and his wife) she works for as a maid and nanny, religiously bathes her baby the Western way, never letting him get dirty. She puts him in a playpen, dresses him in fancy clothes, and acts as though he belongs to a world outside the one she grew up in, to the dismay of her family who witness these changes with incredulity and much sadness. This reaction that can be explained once again through Katerak and Tester’s words: In an Inuit cultural setting, children are at the center of the family life […] The roles of being a parent or grandparent provide fundamental sources of purpose and meaning. Meaning was not found in having or owning material objects or property. These were simply the means of survival for one’s self, one’s family and one’s community. (2017, 7)

Slowly but surely, Elsa gets tangled up in a system where productivity means getting money to buy even more material goods that do not bring her long-term happiness. After a few years of living this unsustainable life, she decides to take Jimmy out on the land and teach him the traditional ways with the help of her uncle, until a police officer comes looking for them, the government imposing the school system on every Inuk child. Elsa and Ian try to run away with the young boy, but eventually are forced to come back when Jimmy falls ill and can only be saved by the modern medical system. Thus, it is through relationships with technology and modernity, as well as the complex issues related to mixed identity that the racism and other injustices of Canada’s colonial system are made apparent. As Elsa comes back to a simpler lifestyle at the end of the film, Jimmy, who continues to draw and dream about planes, leaves Fort Chimo to live down south, perhaps never to step foot again on the land he grew up in. In this vein, in one of the last scenes of the film, we see a plane flying over the Koksoak River, the pilot sending out a message of love (in Inuktitut) to his mother. One way of viewing this scene is to consider how modernity and the colonizer’s way of life have forever changed Indigenous cultures; even if Jimmy is half Inuk, even if he has grown up on the land, learning the language, in the end he chooses modernity and the white man’s way of life. From Before Tomorrow to Restless River, we witness the way intercultural encounters, as viewed through the lens of colonialism, bring about division amongst the Inuit, affecting their health (the entire community dies in Before Tomorrow), their way of life, and demonstrating the discrepancy and inequalities between the colonizer and colonized.

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Jumping forward once again, this time sixty years, Arnait’s Uvanga (2014) is a fiction film based on real people and situations. It demonstrates in a more direct manner the changes brought on by colonization, residential schools, and the partial loss of culture. Shot in Igloolik with several nonprofessional actors and codirected by Cousineau and Ivalu, the film tells the story of a young boy, Tomas (Lukasi Forrest), who travels north with his (white) mother Anna (Marianne Farley) to meet his deceased father’s family in Igloolik. In the filmmakers’ words: “Uvanga is about a few days spent in a family that is representative of Northern Inuit families […] In fact, it is about an encounter between people who don’t know each other, but that are part of the same family. These people have to learn to accept each other. They are connected through family links that they cannot ignore” (Duchesne, 2014). Both Cousineau and actress Marianne Farley agree that Uvanga (which means “myself”) is first and foremost about identity and the fact that although it is rarely talked about, there are many Inuit with mixed origins who ask themselves the questions, “Where do I come from?” and “Who am I?” (Duchesne, 2014). These are questions that will be partially answered during Tomas’s stay with his family, as he is initiated into his first seal hunt by his uncle, learns to communicate with his grandparents (Madeline Ivalu and Samson Kango), who speak mainly Inuktitut, and connects with the land through his relationship with his (half-)brother Travis (Travis Kunnuk). We are also shown some of the contemporary realities of the Inuit, as they have learned to adapt to a way of life where the repercussions of colonialism can be felt through violence, drug abuse, and a very high

Fig. 2.2: Uvanga

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suicide rate. These elements, although present through the character of Ike, do not overshadow the ways in which the community seems to live a peaceful life, having integrated modernity and tradition, by keeping the family unit as close as possible. Intergenerational relationships, such as that which Tomas quickly develops with his grandparents, and the extension of the family nucleus outside of close blood relations insures the survivance of the community as a whole. Where landscape is concerned, in Before Tomorrow, the harsh Arctic winter landscape and the strong contrasts between the wide empty land and the cozy setting of the tent illuminated by the soft qulliq flame emphasize both the shared intimacy and fear of the weather. In Restless River, it is the Koksoak, filmed as a barrier between tradition and modernity, that reveals the beginning of settlements and of the Inuit having to “settle” to modern life. In Uvanga, the motor boats, bungalows, electric guitar, and video games are lit by the twenty-four-hour presence of the sun, shedding light, in every scene, on the ways in which technology has been fully assimilated, especially by the younger generations, those who went to school (often residential school) and had to relearn their culture in an environment where Christianity has replaced teachings that had been kept alive for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Yet, as in the other installments of the trilogy, Uvanga is not about judgment, nor is it about what Vizenor calls “victimry” or choosing one culture over another (2008, 1). In adopting the rhythm of the land and of his inhabitants, and in conveying a story that is lived by many Inuit living up north or in southern cities, the film presents the “clash of cultures and opposing education styles” without using “clichés” or heavy-handed “demonstration” (Gobert, 2014). Furthermore, the relationship between the two brothers, characterized by a will to get to know one another and to remain open to differences and ways of being and thinking, highlights, through a very simple aesthetic style, what intercultural relationships should be but often are not: an opportunity to grow, to internalize differences, and to develop relationality, where “a good heart guarantees a good motive, and good motives benefit everyone involved” (Wilson, 2008, 60). Conclusion In her text about Quebec cinema and community, settler scholar Marion Froger writes about the film narrative being a pretext to a community gift or donation, which the film becomes through a network

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of interactions “that live on well beyond the screen” (2009, 256). The Arnait collective, through their way of working together and developing equal partnerships, brings to life a vision stemming from the people who constitute part of this culture’s reality. The articulation of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, not only through the documentary form but also in the fictional stories that are never far from reality, is a reminder that “values of sharing, interconnectedness, mutual reliance and respect” are not relegated to the past, but are related to a way of being in the world that allows the finding of meaning and being able to share it with others, all the while keeping the spirit of the culture and of individuals alive and well (Tester and Karetak, 2017, 7). In terms of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, Elder Susan Avingaq says that, through Arnait’s work, she ended up in a teaching role and receiving the gratitude of the people, who were thankful to them for bringing back ways that had been forgotten (Hopkins, 2019). In the same way, Madeline Ivalu recounts meeting an Inuk man overwhelmed to see a qulliq seal oil lamp, an object that is very much a character in Before Tomorrow (Hopkins, 2019). As such, the coming together of people from different geographical and cultural spaces around the project of making a film suggests that cinema is a medium able to translate truthful images, or, more specifically, a “transcending image in which truth is not constructed, but is recognized” (Garneau, 2007, 83). Through Arnait’s inspiring trilogy, we the audience are invited to travel through space and time, and to adapt to a particular diegetic rhythm in order to revisit the history of colonization and modernity as seen through an insider’s nuanced point of view on assimilation, adaptation, and survivance. As Zacharias Kunuk had done with Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, 2006), the collective’s narratives are less about pointing a finger or positioning the Inuit as defenseless victims of colonialism, and more about articulating how resilience, humor, strength, and adaptability are used to confront adversity. Works Cited Akittiq, Atuat and Rhoda Akpaliapik Karetak. “Inunnguiniq (Making a Human Being).” Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True. Eds. Joe Karetak, Frank Tester, and Shirley Tagalik. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017. 112–146.

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Armatage, Kay, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault. Gendering the Nation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Arnait Video Productions. “The Making of Before Tomorrow.” 2009. https:// www.isuma.tv/en/isuma-productions/making-tomorrow. Bachand, Denis. “Le prisme identitaire du cinéma québécois. Figures paternelles et interculturalité dans Mémoires affectives et Littoral.” Cinémas 19.1 (2008): 57–73. Bastien, Pierre. “Filmer l’autochtone. De l’ethnographie à l’autonomisation.” Inter 122 (2016): 38–42. Bertrand, Karine. “Le collectif Arnait Video Productions et le cinéma engagé des femmes inuit: guérison communautaire et mémoire culturelle.” Revue canadienne de littérature comparée 44.1 (2017): 36–53. ——. “Kevin Papatie et le renouvellement de la langue algonquine à l’écran.” Intermédialités 4, “Re-dire” (Fall 2011): 1–7. ——. “Martha of the North and Nunavik Narratives of Survivance.” Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos. Eds. Kaganovsky Lilya, Scott Mackenzie, and Anna Westerståhl Stanport. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. 289–301. Bertrand, Karine and Mercédès Baillargeon. “Introduction: Intercultural Encounters in Contemporary Quebec Cinema.” Nouvelles vues (2023). Carrière, Louise. Femmes et cinéma québécois. Montréal: Boréal Express, 1983. Chagnon, Karina. “Entrevue avec Chloé Leriche, réalisatrice du film Avant les rues.” Trahir (2016): 3–11. Chisholm, Dianne. “The Enduring Afterlife of Before Tomorrow: Inuit Survivance and the Spectral Cinema of Arnait Video Productions.” Études Inuit 40.1 (2016): 211–227. CTVM. “En première au Festival du nouveau cinéma ‘La rivière sans repos.’” CTVM.info (8 October 2019). https://ctvm.info/en-premiereau-festival-du-nouveau-cinema-la-riviere-sans-repos/. Duchesne, André. “Cinq questions à … Marie-Hélène Cousineau.” La Presse (18 October 2013). ——. “Uvanga: une histoire familiale sous le soleil de minuit.” La Presse (27 April 2014). Epstein, Helen. “The Highest Suicide Rate in the World.” The New York Review (10 October 2019). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/10/ inuit-highest-suicide-rate/. Froger, Marion. Le cinéma à l’épreuve de la communauté. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2009. Garneau, Michèle. ‘‘Cinéma et communauté, appareil: réflexion à partir de Close-Up d’Abbas Kiarostami et Salam Cinema de Moshen Makhmalbaf.’’ Appareil et intermédialité. Eds. Jean-Louis Déotte, Marion Froger, and Silvestra Mariniello. Paris: l’Harmattan, 2007. 75–96.

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Gobert, Céline. “Uvanga.” 24 Images (1 May 2014). https://revue24images. com/les-critiques/uvanga/. Harvey, Carol J. ‘‘À la découverte du Nord: La rivière sans repos de Gabrielle Roy.’’ Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest 29.2 (2017): 411–427. Hopkins, Candice. “Arnait Video Productions in Conversation with Candice Hopkins 18 April 2019.” Part of the exhibition Arnait Ikajurtigiit: Women Helping Each Other Collective at the Art Gallery of York University. https://agyu.art/project/arnait-in-conversation/. Karetak, Joe and Frank Tester. “Introduction: Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Truth and Reconciliation.” Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True. Eds. Joe Karetak, Frank Tester, and Shirley Tagalik. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017. 1–19. Karetak, Joe, Frank Tester, and Shirley Tagalik. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017. Kattan, Naïm. Culture: alibi ou liberté? Québec: Hurtubise, 1996. Law Insider. “Interculturality Definition.” n.d. https://www.lawinsider.com/ dictionary/interculturality. MacKenzie, Scott and Anna Westerståhl Stenport. “Arnait Video Productions: Inuit Women’s Collective Filmmaking, Coalitional Politics, and a Globalized Arctic.” Camera Obscura 31.3 (2016): 153–163. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001. Morton, Erin and Taryn Sirove. “On Collectivity and the Limits of Collaboration: Caching Igloolik Video in the South.” Reverse Shots, Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context. Eds. Pearson, Wendy Gay and Knabe Susan. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015. 199–217. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” 2021. https://nctr.ca/about/history-of-the-trc/ truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada/. Perrault, Pierre. De la parole aux actes: essais. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1985. Poirier, Christian. Le cinéma québécois: à la recherche d’une identité? Tome 1: l’imaginaire filmique. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2004. Ramond, Charles-Henri. “Rivière sans repos, La—Film de Marie-Hélène Cousineau.” Films du Québec, 2019. https://www.filmsquebec.com/ films/riviere-sans-repos-marie-helene-cousineau/. Smith, Orla. “TIFF interview: Kuessipan filmmakers on their Innu comingof-age story.” Seventh Row, 2019. https://seventh-row.com/2019/09/17/ kuessipan-interview/.

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Soukup, Katarina T. “Travelling through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.1 (March 2006): 239–246. https://cjc.utpjournals.press/doi/10.22230/cjc.2006v31n1a1769. UNESCO. “Glossary.” 2023. https://www.unesco.org/creativity/en/glossary#i. Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerland Vizenor. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 1–23. Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.

Notes 1. According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation of the University of Manitoba, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was created through a legal settlement between Residential Schools Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives and the parties responsible for creation and operation of the schools: the federal government and the church bodies. The TRC’s mandate was to inform all Canadians about what happened in residential schools. The TRC documented the truth of Survivors, their families, communities and anyone personally affected by the residential school experience” (National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, 2021). 2. The four main malagarjuat are: 1) working for the common good and not being motivated by personal interest or gain; 2) living in respectful relationships with every person and thing that one encounters; 3) maintaining harmony and balance; and 4) planning and preparing for the future (Karetak and Tester, 2017, 3).

chapter three

Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe Women Auteurs on the International Film Festival Circuit Ylenia Olibet Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe In the last twenty-five years Quebec cinema has acquired international recognition. This shift is associated with the critical and commercial success of films directed by a new generation of filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Marc Vallée, Philippe Falardeau, Kim Nguyen, Denis Côté, and Xavier Dolan, who have consolidated a reputation as marketable and acclaimed auteurs within the context of global cinema and the international festival circuit. Film festivals have made an important contribution to the circulation of the work of this generation of filmmakers and fueled a critical and academic discourse on the potential for Quebec cinema to articulate locally and linguistically specific narratives, themes, and tropes for global audiences (Baillargeon and Bertrand, 2019; Dequen et al., 2011). Discussions about the internationality of Quebec cinema have largely overlooked women filmmakers. This chapter aims to rectify this oversight by focusing on Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe, whose films, widely circulated within the international film festival circuit, present narratives of migrations, displacement, and borders. The analysis will focus on two elements in particular: their foregrounding of female characters that defy normative constructions of femininity, and their use of gender-specific and feminist positions in the promotion of their films to advance the cause of women filmmakers in the Quebec film industry. Following this premise, I argue on the one hand that these filmmakers contribute to renewing the image of women in francophone Quebec cinema by proposing female protagonists that stand out from social and cultural stereotypes, and on the other hand, that they criticize the gender-biased and unequal production culture of the film industry

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in Quebec and worldwide. In accordance with (neo)liberal standards of Western feminism, critics laud these white women as exceptional and successful, and their achievements within the institutions of global cinema are often used as examples of the Quebec film industry’s progressive gender policies. Yet the filmmakers themselves take a critical stance on the gendered mechanisms of the film industry, negotiate their privileged position as women who have access to filmmaking, and propose approaches to filmmaking that emphasize oblique ways of looking at and living in gendered spaces. My gender-specific perspective in analyzing Quebec transnational cinema eschews any gender essentialism: instead, it is a strategy to position the work of women filmmakers in continuity with the tradition of women’s cinema in Quebec and internationally. As Brenda Longfellow cogently notes in her survey of contemporary sites of feminist film practices in Quebec, “cine-feminism has continuously evolved since the 1970s to adapt to new policy environments, changing discourses of feminism, and through the evolution of new platforms of dissemination, production and funding” (2019, 307). Deraspe and Robichaud are part of a new generation of women filmmakers who counter established cinematic conventions and normative understandings of politics and the nation. Furthermore, these filmmakers expand the specific mandate of women’s cinema in Quebec and elsewhere: to address femininities within and beyond the boundaries of national or cultural identity (Nadeau, 1999). Patricia White, in her study of transnational women’s cinema of the 21st century, writes: women filmmakers from all over the world are navigating institutional politics and making films that have a chance to travel and be seen. Though inevitably shaped and constrained by economic and ideological forces both local and global, in its publicity and circulation this work projects a transnational feminist social vision. (2015, 4–5)

I take White’s affirmation as a starting point to analyze how women filmmakers from Quebec are expressing renewed feminist concerns from a specific geo-linguistic perspective, drawing on the critical framework of cinéma-monde. Originally coined by Bill Marshall as a “category to study Francophone cinema acknowledging centrifugal forces” (2012, 41), Gott and Schilt further theorized cinéma-monde as a framework to explore “the porosity of various kinds of borders in and around francophone spaces and the ways in which languages and identities ‘travel’ in contemporary cinema” (2018, 3). Intended as a “subset of

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transnational cinema” (Higbee, 2018, 346), the concept of cinéma-monde offers a critical lens to assess Quebec cinema that travels within transnational circuits and develops a growing critique of a nationalist discourse that recognizes internal power relations within francophone Quebec. By gendering cinéma-monde, I look into how contemporary women’s cinema in Quebec, shaped both by local feminist film cultures and broader global cinema institutions such as the international film festival circuit, expands cinema-monde’s critique to colonial understandings of francophonie, privileging women’s embodied perspectives. Women’s cinema is a useful concept to define women’s filmmaking from a feminist standpoint, and to place the politics, as well as the material contexts of cinematic production and distribution in the work of women directors (Butler, A., 2002; McHugh, 2009; White, 2015; Maule, 2017). The notion of authorship, central in the feminist theorization of female subjectivity and agency, is fundamental to conceptualizing the distinctiveness of women’s cinema outside of essentialist frameworks. Interrogating the viability of “women’s cinema” as a critical approach, the editors of the collection On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations propose a reassessment of the question of authorship “at a microlevel” and thus invite us to analyze women filmmakers’ formal and cultural strategies as well as their research on film language to express non-dominant forms of identity, relationships, national, and global issues (Margulies and Szaniawski, 2019, 7). Overcoming a limited understanding of authorship as a formalist, and historically masculine, entity to be detected in the textual strategies of film, recent scholarship on female film authorship has moved away from an exclusive focus on the text to a discursive analysis of the filmmaker’s own strategies of professional affirmation (Grant, 2001; Butler, 2002). Patricia White updates this new feminist take on auteurism in terms of a personal and professional position on film language by focusing on the figure of the “[global] woman director as a way to index questions central to contemporary feminism such as visibility, agency, labor, desire, and power” (2015, 19). Following White’s strategic mobilization of the notion of the auteur as a form of agency at work in women’s cultural production and her interrogation of auteurist discourses shaping the circulation of films by women directors in festival networks (2015, 33), I move beyond solely textual accounts of authorship and situate women filmmakers’ formal and cultural strategies in conversation with their position as global women filmmakers. Thus, in each subsection of this chapter I examine how directors Chloé Robichaud and Sophie

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Deraspe consciously construct their authorial personae, and how they reflect on their own position as women working in the film industry. I then analyze how their films, Robichaud’s Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run, 2013) and Deraspe’s Antigone (2019), investigate the construction of femininities in Quebec and engage with local/national and global tensions. I argue that the circulation of these films within the international film festival circuit, specifically the Festival de Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), play a crucial role in shaping their meaning as instances of Quebec’s self-questioning of its identitarian national imaginary.1 A New Generation of Women Directors Before considering my case studies separately, I want to provide the material context for contemporary women’s cinema in Quebec. Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe belong to a new generation of women filmmakers working in the province, which includes, among others, Louise Archambault, Anaïs Barbeau Lavalette, Sophie Dupuis, Chloé Leriche, Anne Émond, and Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, active during the past ten to fifteen years. Even within a postfeminist cultural climate that has dismissed the relevance of feminism, this generation has built upon a solid tradition of women’s filmmaking in Quebec, which, according to Chantal Nadeau, has “address[ed] questions of identities outside the parameters of nationalist rhetoric, exploring instead the borders of the domestic and subjective territories and spaces as a strategy of marking differences” (1999, 198). Moreover, new funding opportunities for feature fiction filmmaking in conjunction with the opening of Quebec’s cinema to transnational markets and audiences have also created favorable conditions for this generation of women filmmakers to emerge and gain attention. Finally, while most of these filmmakers firmly express the fear of being ghettoized within niche audiences and thus refuse to be associated with the label of women’s cinema in favor of a universalist perspective that does not address gender explicitly, they actively participate in new waves of feminist discourses around female filmmaking, coming together as a collectivity under the umbrella of Réalisatrices Équitables.2 Réalisatrices Équitables was founded in 2007 under Isabelle Hayeur and Ève Lamont’s initiative of creating an institutional space for the advancement of women filmmakers. This nonprofit organization has

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three principal objectives: ensuring that public funding for production is allocated equally between men and women; affirming women directors’ thematic and stylistic concerns in the landscape of moving images; and developing a vigilant critique of stereotyped representations of women in film. Since its inception, the organization has produced several reports that use both quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate the disadvantages women filmmakers face in the industry and to illuminate deeper cultural structures that limit women’s advancement at various stages. Réalisatrices Équitables’s discourse on gender equality might be criticized for two main reasons: first, it assumes gender as the only axis of discrimination in the film industry and does not recognize the weight of other systemic forms of exclusion (namely, racism and location); second, it presupposes that women might be assimilated within the existing infrastructures of film production and distribution without radically changing them. 3 Notwithstanding these limits, their work has undeniably had a profound impact on the policies promulgated by the major federal and provincial funding agencies (the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles [SODEC]). Since 2016, these agencies have expressed their commitment to attain gender parity through various approaches (Brinton and McGowan, 2020). In particular, at the provincial level, in Quebec, SODEC announced the so-called “1+1 measure” in 2017: each producer can ask funding for two projects provided that one of them is directed or scripted by a woman.4 A simple glance at the statistics demonstrates a clear increase in the funding of film projects with women directors as well as the budgets for these productions. These institutional changes, intertwined with larger conversations on the role of women in the film industry stemming from the debates raised by the #metoo movement and its local ramifications, constitute a fertile ground for women film directors and producers to realize their projects, and at the same time reinforce an image of Canadian and Quebec governments as progressive. 5 Réalisatrices Équitables is not only active in producing data and instigating institutional awareness of gender equality, but also promotes the visibility of Quebec women filmmakers and fosters an understanding of the réalisatrice [woman filmmaker] in terms of her exceptional authorship. Indeed, as we can read on the group’s website: “What is a female director? She is a creator. Like her male counterparts, she is an artist in charge of directing all phases of a film or TV show […] In short, she makes all the choices (sensory, visual, sound) that impact how the audience perceives and comprehends the screenplay or subject matter.

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In other words, the female director signs the work” (my emphasis). As a collective representative of concrete and situated instances of Quebec’s women cinema, Réalisatrices Équitables promotes the work of women directors within a framework that does not necessarily or explicitly claim a feminist standpoint, but nonetheless recognizes the necessity of affirming women’s place as creative workers in the Quebec film industry.6 Their embrace of an auteurist approach mirrors the individual strategies that each filmmaker deploys in constructing her authorial persona. Within this context, Chloé Robichaud and Sophie Deraspe occupy a peculiar position because of their exposure and access to the networks and institutions of global cinema. Dominant auteurist discourses of genius and ownership frame the reception of these filmmakers and their films within the international film festival circuit, emphasizing their exceptionality as women and branding them as paradigmatic success stories. In turn, Robichaud and Deraspe use their privileged status and visibility as acclaimed auteurs to discuss their own formation, working conditions, and experiences of navigating the mechanisms of Quebec’s film industry as women. While they appeal to a broader audience, and mostly deny any explicit political affiliation with women’s cinema, they also articulate their commitment to foregrounding trajectories of female subjects in their films, intervening in the masculinist imaginary of Quebec cinema. Although these two filmmakers do not claim specific affinities with each other, they still are very conscious about their belonging to a wave of women directors that is redefining identities and imaginaries through their films. By studying them together, while still addressing their individual specificities, I try to minimize an individualized approach that might dehistoricize the impact of feminist film culture on their practice (McHugh, 2009, 114–115). Instead, I stress the interplay of modes of film production and circulation and of the role of feminisms in shaping their work in a similar way. Even when Robichaud and Deraspe receive major funding, they still foster a production culture close to an artisanal ethos: they value artistic collaborations with other women met throughout their film education, and they opt to work with small production companies. After their films make the major festivals, they are distributed within the francophone art-house circuit, mostly in Quebec and in France, but also on specialized streaming platforms in the US. In this respect, the circulation of their films confirms the “minor” position they occupy vis-à-vis mainstream circuits of distribution in Canada and North America, but it also creates a privileged geography of

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flows of exchange within francophonie. Yet this circulation amplifies the meaning of these films that thematically address the tensions between local and global, explore the borders of identity formation in Quebec, and decentralize normative understanding of space and hegemonic mechanisms of separation between the private and the political. Chloé Robichaud’s Introverted Authorship I received a lot of attention and it was a bit dazzling […] And then, Xavier Dolan was in the foreground […] The personality of the filmmaker started to become an aspect of marketing. At the beginning, I was intimidated. Now that I am 30 years old, I feel more confident. I understood who I am and I am not ashamed of what I have to tell. I don’t force myself to be what I am not, nor to fit a glamorous or eccentric image. I don’t try to be something else other than myself. (Robichaud in Lussier, 2018)

Chloé Robichaud (b. 1988) emerged as an international auteur when she was twenty-five years old, thanks to her exposure at the Cannes Film Festival, first in 2012 with Chef de meute (Herd Leader) competing for the Palme d’Or in the short film category, and the year after, when her first feature film, Sarah préfère la course (2013), was selected in the section “Un Certain Regard.”7 Robichaud’s above statement about her experience as a young filmmaker at Cannes, which she gave in a recent interview, reflects the ability of this filmmaker to reconcile her rather introverted personality with the international exposure of an authorial status suddenly acquired through the global film festival circuit.8 Mentioning Xavier Dolan, known as the enfant terrible of Quebec cinema because of his iconoclastic refusal of the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2012 for his film Laurence Anyways, Robichaud takes the occasion to distance herself from Dolan and affirms the specificity of her own cinema. Many film critics have contrasted Robichaud’s introversion and minimalist aesthetic choices to Dolan’s eccentric personality and flamboyant cinema, taken as exemplary of Quebec cinema’s potential to attract global audiences. The parallels between the two filmmakers are easy to draw: both are young and queer, their films are exhibited at major international film festivals, they have established themselves as spokespeople of their generation even through divergent cinematic styles, taking critical distance from Quebec’s national culture and articulating locally situated narratives within cosmopolitan art-cinema conventions. Moreover, both have foregrounded queer narratives while deliberately

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detaching themselves from any explicit political intent of queer cinema.9 However, even if Robichaud inscribes her portrayal of lesbian experience within a universalist discourse of art cinema instead of embracing an activist tone, it is possible to track an evolution in Robichaud’s own position vis-à-vis gender and sexuality concerns. Her first feature, a film that avoids the explicit narrativization of the protagonist’s coming out, established her reputation as a talented young filmmaker from Quebec. Subsequently, with the webseries Féminin/Féminin (2014–2018) Robichaud progressively became more explicit in addressing lesbianism and, with her second feature Pays (Boundaries, 2016), the articulation of women’s embodied worldviews within masculine environments. Robichaud challenges abstract and universalizing constructions of femininity in art cinema. She creates an alternative cinematic space in which feminine subjectivities are not fixed into images, but are continuously defined and redefined through an exploration of desire, of the intimate, of the boundaries between the personal and the political. Thus, I contend that Robichaud’s own positioning as an auteur is a controlled strategy with a twofold function: first, it allows her to legitimize her thematic and stylistic choices without explicitly subscribing to a political feminist mandate. Second, by framing her filmmaking approach within an art-cinema tradition, she brands her work for international distribution within the festival and art-house circuits, making locally inflected settings and Quebec French-accented narratives attractive for a global (although mostly francophone) high-brow audience. As a global woman director, Robichaud deconstructs essentialist assumptions about women’s filmmaking, but acknowledges her embodied perspective in deliberately choosing to represent feminine characters. On the one hand, she is irritated by a critical discourse that constantly invokes her gender and attempts to confine her cinema within the realm of the “feminine” as an “othered” world; on the other hand, she assertively invites us to consider a gendered enunciative standpoint as a category of interpretation for her cinema. She says: “I make women’s cinema in the sense that I try to propose complex and, I hope, realist women characters,” justifying her choice to express “her reality as a woman” through female-centered narratives that address women as spectators (Gobert and Lanlo, 2018, 46–47). While Robichaud does not explicitly conceive of her cinema as either political or feminist, she nonetheless creates a cinematic universe that puts forward women’s identities and desiring subjectivities through her particular treatment of mise-en-scène and cinematography. Robichaud proposes an intervention

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within dominant cinematic constructions of femininity through some specific stylistic choices: a minimalist cinema foregrounding the interior world of female characters instead of developing linear plots, Brechtian estranging devices, and irony. Thus, her cinema challenges a reception framework that, instead of accounting for the aesthetic means and strategies of address deployed by women filmmakers in opposition to dominant cinematic languages, usually essentializes le cinéma de femmes as a cinema that reflects women’s sensibility.10 This hesitancy to designate her filmmaking as political does not prevent Robichaud from vocally articulating her concerns regarding the scarcity of women behind the camera in the Quebec film industry, and the need for structural change. She finds the quota system to be a necessary, albeit not final, step towards gender equality in the film industry. Suggesting that the quota system might hide an essentializing implication and that it is only a provisory solution, she says: What is more important, to me, is less the sex of the director than who the story onscreen is talking about and if it includes enough complex and subtle feminine characters. I care more about equality on the screen, but it is necessary to give the same opportunity [to everyone] behind the camera. (Robichaud in Lussier 2018; my translation)

This quotation demonstrates that Robichaud tries to counter a simplistic gender-equality discourse that relies on a numerical approach without taking into account further cultural changes needed in the film industry. Dissociating the filmmaker’s gender from aesthetic and thematic choices onscreen, Robichaud offers another point of entry to interpret her intervention within the discourse around women’s cinema: her attention to the intimate, to details, to the interiority of women’s characters, as well as her aesthetic strategies to mark difference, must not be mechanically attributed to her gender, but rather to her embodied position and conscious intention to reinvent cinematic language, and to create new codes that deconstruct a static iconography of femininity and value instead nonnormative embodiments of femininities. Robichaud’s authorship is marked by an interest in trajectories of feminine subjectivities alternative to progressive and closed narratives of womanhood, dovetailed with an implicit distancing from the national narratives preponderant in Quebec’s cinema. This is particularly evident in Sarah préfère la course. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s concept of “queer failure,” I argue that this film, through a troubled coming-of-age story and the foregrounding of the lesbian body, proposes a critique

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both of heteronormative institutions of the nation and of neoliberal standards of successful femininity, thus articulating a tension between local and global issues of gender and sexuality. Halberstam, through an analysis of different written and visual texts both from popular culture and contemporary art, explores “failure” as a form of queer critique and resistance to “specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” which are considered as standards of success within the parameters of a “heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2). In that context, explains Halberstam, “lesbian is irrevocably tied to failure” because the queer body refuses the logic of “achievement, fulfillment, and success(ion)” (2011, 94; emphasis original).11 Sarah préfère la course is a film driven by the intimate world of its protagonist, the eponymous Sarah (Sophie Desmarais), a young woman from the suburbs of Quebec City whose only passion, interest, and motivation seems to be running. Her athletic ability grants her a scholarship from McGill University, which represents an opportunity to move to Montreal. Because Sarah’s mother cannot financially support her daughter, Sarah accepts the scholarship only when her friend Antoine (Jean-Sebastien Courchesne) offers to move to Montreal as her roommate and to help her financially. While Antoine seems to be emotionally involved with Sarah, she does not show any sign of attraction for him. Already throughout this first part of the film the sober mise-en-scène connotes Sarah as somewhat queer, and small hints seem to suggest that Sarah does not conform to glamorous and normative standards of femininity: she does not wear makeup, she either wears sporty clothes or simple/neutral shirts, and she does not hesitate to devour a poutine. In order to receive economic aid for married young couples studying at the university, Antoine suggests that they marry. After some hesitancy, Sarah accepts, but is not interested in developing coupledom or a household, and the two continue to live as housemates. Meanwhile, Sarah is fully immersed in her training at McGill, where she gets to know her female teammates. Within the spaces of the gym, the running fields, the showers in the locker rooms, inhabited as homosocial enclaves by Sarah’s body, the protagonist timidly explores her homoerotic desire through furtive glances, developing an attraction to one of her teammates, Zoey (Geneviève Bouvin-Roussy). Nothing is explicit about Sarah and Zoey’s relationship: one day, they spend the afternoon in Zoey’s bedroom without really talking or doing anything, just lying on the bed until Zoey falls asleep. By sharing this intimate moment of unproductivity,

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the two young women inhabit a queer temporality, a suspension from the frenetic rhythms of successful femininity. This state of intimate abstraction and deferral from the constraints of productivity reaches its climax during a student party, where Zoey performs karaoke, singing “Un jour, il viendra mon amour,” a poignant love song from the early 1970s. Contrapuntally to the mundane settings and lighting of the rest of the film, this scene is somewhat marked by excess: a dim lilac light frames Zoey’s face in close-up as she sings; shot/reverse shots alternate close-ups of Sarah watching Zoey whose voice, in Sarah’s imagination, takes on the limpid and high-pitched tones of the French-Canadian singer Diane Dufresne. Even though Sarah and Zoey are not looking directly at each other, the song performed by Zoey and heard by Sarah connects them in a moment of shared sublimation of their attraction, which ends when Sarah starts to feel an acute pain in her chest. After this episode, Sarah’s life is unsettled when she learns she has a heart condition that might prevent her from pursuing her career as an athlete. However, in the last scene of the film, before a track meet, Sarah takes off the equipment that is measuring her health and decides that she will keep running. Sarah’s final sprint at the end of the film, preceded by a quiet yet confident gesture of hand touching in the locker room with Zoey, constitutes a liberatory vital act that functions as a metaphor of the protagonist’s refusal to be contained within established paths of normative femininity. The film does not proceed according to a progressive narrative, but rather through a juxtaposition of episodes, dominated by silences or

Fig. 3.1: Sarah préfère la course

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short and slow dialogues that convey the protagonist’s experience of the world as an introvert. By refusing the conventions of the comingof-age plot and privileging a rather coy articulation of lesbian sexual desire, the film elaborates a representation of feminine subjectivity that, through the “failure” at heteronormativity, ultimately disrupts and dismantles linear narratives of identity formation at the level of the personal and the intimate. Sarah’s rejection of settling within the institution of heterosexual marriage, along with her implicit deflection from glossy and accomplished femininity, opens up a space of alterity that does not posit patriarchal ideals as the model for growth and identity formation. In this respect, by inscribing the female lesbian body at the center of the film, Robichaud addresses issues of gendered representations that counter Quebec cinema’s dominant discourse that has defined men’s experiences as universal and authentic representations of a Québécois subject. Through a female character that “fails” at proper womanhood, Robichaud instigates an oppositional standpoint to the political and auteurist tradition in Quebec national cinema preoccupied with masculinist and hegemonic constructions of the nation (Nadeau, 1999). In Sarah préfère la course, the question of Quebec nationalism is only briefly and almost incidentally acknowledged, and soon dismissed with irony. When Sarah, as a new member of the McGill Athletics Team, is interviewed by an anglophone McGill student for the university newspaper, she seems disoriented and chuckles at the sudden question: “Tu te considères souverainiste?” [Do you consider yourself a Quebec nationalist?]. The interviewer insists, asking instead: “Are you proud to be a Canadian athlete?” to which Sarah replies: “I am only proud when I beat my record and I win a match.” Sarah’s indifference to these questions of provincial vs. federal nationalism must not be interpreted as a simple dismissal of political issues on the part of the young generation, but rather as a distancing from narrow understandings of the political within the discourse of the nation. While there is no overt critique of Quebec and Canadian nationalisms, Sarah’s trajectory of failure within the heteronormative institution of marriage displaces overt political preoccupations of nation-building to the realm of the personal through a veiled critique of those very social and economic structures that constitute the basis of the nation. These brief allusions to the specifically local context of Quebec along with the linguistic specificity of the city of Montreal, in which French and English continuously mingle, especially within the milieu of anglophone

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universities, are in dialectic tension with a lesbian coming-of-age narrative that makes the film highly “exportable” and attractive to the cosmopolitan audiences of the international film festival circuit. In the film, the force and the structures of the national are destabilized through a feminine subjectivity that refuses to conform to established gender and sexual roles in a neoliberal culture that emphasizes empowerment and success. In this respect, Robichaud’s intervention within the cinematic imaginary illustrates how francophone women’s cinema in Quebec is able to reach transnational circuits of film exhibition and distribution. The Sophisticated Cinema of Sophie Deraspe: Between Documentary and Myth In fall 2019, the promotional image of the film Antigone started to spread widely around the city of Montreal either in the form of posters on the walls of public spaces or on cards distributed in coffee shops and cinemas. The image is predominantly a vivid red square out of which emerges the stylized shape of lead actress Nohema Ricci’s face. The aesthetics of the image and the way it is distributed seem to be borrowed from urban street art, resembling stenciled pictures and political graffiti. I am using this film’s paratext as an introduction to my analysis of Antigone because the dissemination of the publicity images around the city of Montreal at the time of the film’s release mirrors some of the thematic concern within the film text with the role of grassroots forms of information in creating a counter public sphere against hegemonic discourses of Canadian citizenship. In this respect, the poster is not only a simple advertisement object, but an expansion of the film’s diegesis, creating a play between fiction and truth, sociohistorical reality and myth, boundaries that are at the core of Sophie Deraspe’s filmography. Born in 1973 at Rivière-du-Loup, a small city on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in northern Quebec, Deraspe has made both documentary and fiction feature films. She was consecrated as an auteur with her second fiction film, Les signes vitaux (Vital Signs, 2010), which contributed to the definition of the so-called renouveau du cinema québécois or Quebec new wave (Sirois-Trahan, 2010; Bailey, 2010). In this film, a respectful meditation on the affect of care work in a palliative care center through the eyes of disabled protagonist Simone (Marie-Hélène Bellavance), the concern with the materiality of bodies marked by the signs of passing time, disease, and death is not a morbid

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or objectifying examination of pain, rather an ethical quest on the importance of kinds of relationality defined beyond strictly normative bonds of kinship. The film, like Deraspe’s first feature, Rechercher Victor Pellerin (2006), presents an experimental study of fiction narratives that unfold in documentary styles, and established Deraspe’s reputation as a talented original filmmaker. As a director who asserts her agency by controlling her auteurist position, Deraspe does not shy away from discussing her artistic process, including her methods of research and writing, intellectualizing her work, and sharing her cultural references. At the same time, in defining her filmmaking, she also stresses the technical aspects, reclaiming her savvy knowledge as a film editor and director of photography (Gobert and Lanlo, 2017, 78; Banzhaf, 2019). This insistence allows her to defy abstract notions of female authorship, and brings forward the practical and physical dimension of working in the film industry. Thus, she situates her filmmaking practice within an artisanal ethos, asserting her preference for independent cinema modes of production characterized by small budgets and flexible structures that allow for creative freedom, the director’s personal involvement in different stages, and impromptu experimentation. This peculiar method of working is ultimately what constitutes for Deraspe the specificity of women’s cinema, which she defines as a “small, specialized cinema, independent, d’auteur,” citing Andrea Arnold and Debra Granik as models (Gobert and Lanlo, 2017, 81–84). This definition of women’s cinema avoids any explicit political connation, but it allows Deraspe to justify the marginality and minor position of her cinema within hegemonic modes of representation and filmmaking. Her cinema is concerned with issues of mediation that shape our understanding of reality, and is interested in exploring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Thematically, this preoccupation is carried over through female characters’ narrative quests for truth as they try to decipher their existence, attempt to deconstruct linear narratives of identity formation, redefine interpersonal connections through an ethics of care and outside rigid models of social relations. Notwithstanding this condition of marginality, Deraspe also recognizes her privileged position as a woman filmmaker able to make several feature films in Quebec. From this exceptional perspective, she can speak up regarding the place of women filmmakers in the Quebec film industry. While she overtly acknowledges the structural difficulties that women might face in accessing budgets to make their own films, she also invites women to be more assertive and confident in their projects.

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She believes that the milieu of independent cinema, with the creative freedom it allows, constitutes a space where women filmmakers can advance their projects even with small budgets, which eventually will allow them to progressively access greater funding (Gobert and Lanlo 2017, 81). In this respect, Deraspe seems to endorse a postfeminist approach that tends to disregard the specificity of gender as constitutive of women’s experience, and emphasizes instead individual choice and personal responsibility as determining of women’s success (Tasker and Negra, 2007). Through this posture, Deraspe attempts to situate herself and her work outside an essentializing critical reception discourse that would frame her only as a “woman.” This postfeminist stance can be interpreted more as a strategy of personal self-affirmation than a straightforward assimilation within the difficult mechanisms of the film industry. Deraspe’s preference for artisanal methods of filmmaking, rooted in the production structures of the Quebec film industry, is counterpointed by the trajectory of her career that saw her progressively acquire visibility within the international film festival circuit, especially with her last two features: The Amina Profile, premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, and Antigone, which won the Best Canadian Feature Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 and was consequently selected as Canada’s choice for the Oscars nomination in 2020. Not surprisingly, both these films deal with questions of traveling, international relations, and constructions and definitions of nation and citizenship within the complicated networks of local and global institutions, thus thematizing transnational narratives rooted in Quebec that appeal to the taste of the cosmopolitan audiences of the renowned international film festivals mentioned above. The films explore cinematic worlds that construct alternative models of affections and sociality, even though the context of reception at these festivals tends to frame films foregrounding narratives of feminine subjectivities within a Western-centric humanitarian discourse. In this respect, the case of Antigone is particularly interesting. An adaptation of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy (mediated through Bertold Brecht’s and Jean Anouilh’s versions) in present-day multicultural Montreal, the film deals with questions of diasporic identities through a female-centered narrative that challenges the rigid judicial system and immigration policies of the Canadian state. Even if the film is anchored within the local context of Quebec, through cultural references to francophone literature from

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Quebec (with a quotation of a poem by De Saint-Denys Garneau), a multilingualism that mixes Québécois and Kabyle, and an extra-textual reference to a Montreal-based news story, it does not address immigration policies specific to Quebec. Transcending any preoccupation with Quebec’s nationalist history and politics, the film’s narrative is instead situated within the framework of the supra-national institution of Canada. Thus, whereas Deraspe does not renounce a francophone cultural specificity, she contributes to an opening of the meaning of ‘the national’ to plurality by foregrounding immigrant experience as constitutive of Canadian social reality, thus displacing Quebec cinema’s concern with a narrow definition of national identity. The context of circulation and exhibition further complicates the relations between local/global, national/transnational that the film poses. In this regard, the passage of Antigone at the TIFF is particularly relevant. The TIFF has established itself as one of the most important film festivals in North America through its progressive program, and its “national spotlight program” which “needs to reflect the cinematic output of the entire nation” (Czach, 2004). Thus, Antigone, a family drama proposing a commentary on the refugee and immigrant experience in North America, contributes to the festival’s scope of projecting an image of Canada as a progressive country. Within the context of the TIFF, while Antigone offers a critique of normative constructions of femininity and the repressive institutions of the state, it appeals to Western audiences’ gaze on narratives of immigration. This is most evident in the background story that is at the origin of the protagonist’s precarious status in Canada: Antigone and her family, comprising her grandmother, her sister Ismene, and her two brothers Eteocles and Polynices reached Canada in the early 2000s with refugee status from an unnamed home country. While this country is never specifically acknowledged, in the press kit Deraspe refers to Antigone’s family as Algerian immigrants. Yet, in the film, the spectator only gets a sense of Antigone’s family origins because of the grandmother’s refusal to speak French and obstinacy to communicate only in Kabyle. Arguably, by denying the historical specificity of the events that are the cause of the family’s refugee status, the film contributes to a Western-centric imaginary that amalgamates the conflicts in the Global South and the consequent refugee experiences.12 Adapting the myth of Antigone, established in the Western philosophical tradition as a feminist figure ante litteram, Deraspe’s film articulates a critique not only of the political sphere, but also a

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national bureaucracy that conceives citizenship only within formal norms. According to feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Antigone “is always worth reflecting upon as a historical figure and as an identity and identification for many girls and women living today” (2000, 70) for her challenge both to the political order established by men and to the role of subordination expected by her gender. Queer philosopher Judith Butler has also thoroughly analyzed Antigone as a “counterfigure” (2002, 1) that opens up a radical critique of the authority of the state because she troubles heteronormative understanding of kinship: “Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement, one that puts the reigning regimes of representation into crisis and raises the question of […] what sustaining web of relations makes our lives possible” (2002, 24). By defending an ethical order founded on interpersonal relationships against the official laws of the state, Antigone becomes a personification of the marginalized individuals who are to various degrees discriminated against or excluded by dominant social, cultural, and political norms. Deraspe draws on Antigone’s emblematic force and integrity to tell the story of a young woman with no official citizen status in Canada who defies rigid mechanisms of immigration policy and a patriarchal power that is dispersed throughout various institutions of the nation (police, tribunal, judges, politicians) that are deaf to her desperate claim for justice within an alternative ethical system of value based on kinship. The news story that constitutes the source of inspiration for Antigone is the shooting of Fredy Villanueva, an innocent eighteenyear-old Honduran immigrant killed by a police officer in the deprived neighborhood of Montreal Nord in 2008. The episode provoked protests against police brutality. Fredy’s sister, Patricia, was particularly vocal and active in demanding justice. By drawing on this local story of police violence, and its consequences for people without secure residency status in Canada, Deraspe anchors Antigone’s myth within a specific geopolitical and social reality to critique the rigid mechanism that regulate immigrants’ precarious conditions in the West. In the film, myth and realist style continuously intertwine. The mise-en-scène sharply distinguishes the spaces of social relations constituted at the level of kinship where Antigone shares intimate moments of conviviality with her family, and the cold spaces (prison, tribunal, airport) where Antigone’s body is confined by the state. The cinematography closely follows the characters with fluid camera movements and a hand-held camera that often lingers on the characters’

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faces in close-ups that isolate them as archetypical figures. In the original Greek tragedy, Antigone’s act of defiance is the burial of her brother Polynices (killed by his brother Eteocles) against the order of Creon, who had commanded that his corpse to be left on the battlefield as punishment for bringing war to Thebes. In the film, instead, Eteocles is killed by the police in the park where he is playing with some friends and his brother Polynices. The latter is prisoned, accused of assaulting the officer who shot his brother. Antigone’s act of defiance in the film is to rescue her brother Polynices by helping him escape from prison. With the complicity of her sister Ismene and her grandmother Méni, Antigone decides to take Polynices’s place in prison and in order to do so, she undertakes a transformation that erases the most evident signs of her femininity, notably cutting her long hair. This highly theatrical device of cross-dressing literally embodies Antigone’s transgression of both gender expectations and more specifically of her position as a Canadian resident without official citizenship status. Because of her actions, she is repeatedly threatened with the denial of Canadian citizenship and of deportation for herself and her whole family. Throughout the film, Antigone stands out as a strong and determined character who vocally defends the reason why she chose to take her brother’s place and advocates for a broad sense of justice that cannot be contained by the official laws of the state. In her challenge to the institutions of the state, Antigone is supported by her high school friend Hémon, a Québécois, with whom she develops

Fig. 3.2: Antigone

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a romantic relationship that culminates in sex towards the end of the film. Ultimately, however, by refusing to do what is necessary to stay in Canada, Antigone also refuses to do what is necessary to stay with Hémon and thus to produce the expected heteronormative closure that leads to citizenship. At the end of the film, Antigone, her grandmother, and Polynices are escorted by the police at the airport to be deported. Antigone sees moving in the opposite direction a newly arrived family of refugees who resemble her own family as we saw them at the beginning of the film. The intense look that she exchanges with the child in the stroller, in whom Antigone recognizes herself when she arrived with her own family in Canada, creates a short-circuit in the plot that, instead of moving forward towards a resolution, circles back onto itself. On the one hand, this circularity points to the state of suspension in which immigrants without full citizenship exist, a condition in which they are denied full humanity until they meet legal requirements (Agamben, 1998). On the other hand, this circular temporality extracts the story from the specific geopolitical context of the current refugee crisis and reinserts it within a mythological order. Conclusion Taken together, Sarah préfère la course and Antigone deterritorialize the discourse of identity in Quebec cinema through female characters that defy normative constructions of national culture and politics and refuse normative and fixed gendered positions. Both films articulate local narratives situated in the specificity of the Quebec sociocultural context beyond and outside merely national concerns, elaborating a more flexible notion of Québécois identity and Quebec national cinema. The narratives of these films are in conversation both with local cinematic traditions of auteur cinema and with global art-cinema aesthetics, addressing the cosmopolitan audiences of film festivals. The successful circulation of these films in prestigious international festivals challenges Quebec’s peripheral status (Marshall, 2010) within francophone and North American circuits. The figure of the global woman filmmaker who actively controls auteurist discourses that frame the reception of her film, also plays a crucial role in drawing attention to the global nature of Quebec cinema. In this chapter, I have considered authorial practices as a strategy of personal affirmation on the part of Robichaud and Deraspe as their work emerges within the international film festival circuit.

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Both directors express some discomfort with the category of cinéma de femmes as a label that could risk continued ghettoization of their work. Yet they also provide their own personal definition of women’s cinema and situate their work in relation to it. While they refuse explicit affiliation with feminist cinema, they develop in their films marks of enunciation and narratives that explore the borders of gender and sexual identities, reshaping the imagery of the representation of femininities in Quebec cinema. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Bailey, Patricia. “A New Generation of Quebec Filmmakers Captures a Culture Adrift.” This Magazine (6 July 2010). https://this.org/2010/07/06/ quebec-film/. Baillargeon, Mercédès and Karine Bertrand. “Introduction: le transnationalisme du cinéma et des (nouveaux) médias québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 137–150. Banzhaf, Sofia. “In Conversation: Canadian Filmmakers Sophie Deraspe & Sofia Banzhaf.” (1 November 2019). https://www.canadagoose.com/en/ beyond/filmmakers-sophie-sofia/. Brinton, Susan and Sharon McGowan. “Gender Advocacy in Canadian Film and Television: Are Women Finally Breaking Through?” Women in the International Film Industry: Police, Practice, and Power. Ed. Susan Liddy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 253–268. Butler, Alison. Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Chahine, Joumane. “On the Road: Canadian Cinema and the World.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 36–53. Corrigan, Timothy. “The Commerce of Auteurism: A Voice without Authority.” New German Critique 9 (1990): 43–57. Czach, Liz. “Film Festivals, Programming, and the Building of a National Cinema.” The Moving Image, 4.1 (2004): 76–88. Dequen, Bruno, Martin Bilodeau, Philippe Gajan, Germain Lacasse, Sylvain Lavallé, Marie-Claude Loiselle, and Jean-Pierre Sirois Trahan. “Renouveau du cinéma québécois.” 24 Images 152 (2011): 14–22.  

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Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Global Author: Control, Creative Constraints, and Performative Self-Contradiction.” The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in the 21st Century Cinema. Eds. Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 21–42. Gobert, Céline and Jean-Marie Lanlo. Le cinéma québécois au féminin. Longueuil: Les Éditions de L’instant même, 2017. Gott, Michael and Thibaut Schilt, eds. “The Kaleidoscope of Cinéma-monde.” Cinéma-monde: Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 1–24. Grant, Catherine. “Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship.” Feminist Theory 2.1 (2001): 113–130. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/14647000122229325. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Higbee, Will. “Cinéma-monde and the Transnational.” Cinéma-monde: Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Ed. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 341–356. Irigaray, Luce. Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Longfellow, Brenda. “Political Modernism, Policy Environments, and Digital Daring: The Changing Politics and Practices of Cine-Feminism in Quebec, 1967–2015.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 307–332. Lussier, Marc André. “Chloé Robichaud: à bas les cloisons!” La Presse (24 September 2018). https://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/cinema-quebecois/ entrevues/201809/24/01-5197707-chloe-robichaud-a-bas-les-cloisons. php. Margulies, Ivone, and Jeremi Szaniawski, eds. “Introduction. On Women’s Films: Moving Thought across Worlds and Generations.” On Women’s Films across Worlds and Generations. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 1–24. Marshall, Bill. “Cinéma-monde? Towards a Concept of Francophone Cinema.” Francosphères 1.1 (2012): 35–51. ——. “New Spaces of Empire: Quebec Cinema’s Centers and Peripheries.” Cinema at the Periphery. Ed. Dina Iordanova. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. 119–134. Massimi, Fulvia. “Mosaic Men: Critical Masculinities and National Identities in Contemporary Subnational Cinemas.” Dissertation, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, 2018. Maule, Rosanna. Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse: Women’s Cinema 2.0. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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McHugh, Kathleen. “The World and the Soup: Historicizing Media Feminisms in Transnational Contexts.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24.3 (2009): 111–151. Nadeau, Chantal. “Barbaras en Québec: Variations on Identity.” Gendering the Nation. Ed. Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 197–211. Ravary-Pilon, Julie. “Entre Prized Content et Lesbian Multicasting: étude comparative entre la saison 1 et la saison 2 de la série web québécoise Féminin/Féminin.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29.2 (2020): 52–74. Réalisatrices Équitables. “Parity and Statistics.” 2020. https://realisatricesequitables.com/parity-and-statistics/. Sirois-Trahan, Jean-Pierre. “La mouvée et son dehors: renouveau du cinéma québécois.” Cahiers du cinéma 660 (2010): 76–78. Tarr, Carrie and Brigitte Rollet. Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra, eds. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. White, Patricia. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Notes 1. These two festivals represent two distinct yet fundamental nodes for the transnational circulation of Quebec cinema (Chahine, 2019). On the one hand, Cannes, the festival that has historically established the canons of national cinemas as art cinema in opposition to the dominance of Hollywood, has played a crucial role in promoting the uniqueness of Quebec cinema since the 1970s. In the last few decades, this festival has maintained its position as a crucial hub for the consecration of Quebec filmmakers as international auteurs (Denys Arcand, Xavier Dolan) ensuring the distribution of their films in France’s art-house cinema circuit (Chahine, 2019, 42). On the other hand, the TIFF, the international festival that promotes and shapes Canada national cinema, showcases Quebec cinema in its linguistic specificity as part of the Canadian cinematic canon for a North American audience. In this respect, the two festivals guarantee the visibility of Quebec cinema within different frameworks and addressing multiple audiences.

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2. Other successful Quebec-based female filmmakers who have recently gained visibility are Monia Chokri, who presented La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love, 2019) and Simple comme Sylvain (The Nature of Love, 2023) at the Cannes film festival and Babysitter (2022) at Sundance Film Festival, and Myriam Charles, whose Cette maison (This House, 2022) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. These filmmakers have used festivals as platforms to foster renewed feminist and gender-specific informed discourses within the film industry and approaches to filmmaking. 3. It must be noted that within Réalisatrices Équitables, the Diversity Committee is engaged in assuring the promotion of women filmmakers from cultural minorities and First Nations, also providing mentorship programs and helping to create access to resources. 4. Government agencies provide independent producers with funding to make films. In March 2016, the National Film Board (NFB) announced a policy that 50 percent of its productions must be directed by women and 50 percent of budget allocation was guaranteed to projects directed by women. Moreover, in 2017 the NFB committed to achieving gender equality in key creative positions (screenwriting, editing, cinematography, and music composition). Telefilm Canada’s gender parity measures, announced in 2016, provide incentives for film portfolios with women in key creative roles. 5. In 2017–2018, after Telefilm and SODEC introduced parity incentive measures, “the number of projects accepted and budgets allocated to women directors has doubled” compared to the years 2013–2016 (Réalisatrices Équitables, 2020). 6. The tendency to detach explicit discourses of feminism from women’s filmmaking practices is not uncommon within francophone film culture: in particular, women filmmakers in France usually downplay their gender and do not engage with feminist film theory as mostly developed in anglophone film criticism and scholarship (Tarr and Rollet, 2001, 1–2). 7. Here and throughout this chapter, I will use the French masculine auteur because the directors analyzed do not tend to use the feminine auteure. The femininization of the French language and the use of inclusive language is quite recent and not yet normalized in mainstream communication. 8. Theoretically I draw on an understanding of authorship in terms of “material strategies of social agency” (Corrigan, 1990, 47). In other words, “author” does not refer to an individual artist whose subjectivity is to be traced in the film text; it is instead the product of reception discourses and cinema’s broader industrial structures. Textual and extra-textual discourses (including any director’s own strategic definition and control of their authorship) contribute to shaping the function of the author. Elsaesser (2016) writes: “the author in the global context is both a construct and a personality, a locus of agency (control) as well as a focal point of projection (access).”

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9. Scholar Fulvia Massimi has analyzed Dolan’s work as an expression of a post-gay sensibility, defined as a “disengagement with identity politics practices that position activism at the center of the gay experience” (2018, 137). This framework is also useful to study and interpret Robichaud’s work as she does not completely disengage with “lesbian” as a self-identifying term, but detaches her cinema from a narrow focus on gender and sexuality and from an activist notion of queer representation. 10. Although cinéma de femmes is the literal translation of women’s cinema, this French term does not have the same theoretical connotations. Thus, in this context, I use cinéma de femmes to refer to a commercial essentializing category that includes films made by women and supposedly reflecting women’s sensibilities. In French, cinéma de femmes has not been properly theorized as an oppositional cinema that counters patriarchal ideology. 11. Julie Ravary-Pilon (2020) has also applied Halberstam’s concept of queer failure to Robichaud’s web series Féminin/Féminin. 12. Audiences might grasp the Algerian origins of Antigone’s family either from their familiarity with Montreal being home to a significant number of Maghrebi immigrants, or from intertextual connections with recent films about the Algerian diaspora in Montreal—most notably, Montréal la Blanche (Bachir Bensaddek, 2016). Yet, textually, Antigone does not provide any specific background information on the Algerian Civil War that in the early 2000s was at the origin of a consistent wave of immigration from Algeria to Quebec. Thus, the film implies a tension between the specificity of the immigration milieu of Montreal and a more general abstraction of the refugee experience in North America that depends on the film’s scalar reception within provincial, national, and international circuits of distribution.

PART II

Trends and Genres

chapter four

Around the Fire Contemporary Québécois Cinema and the Endangered Forest Julie-Françoise Tolliver Around the Fire

This chapter investigates Québécois films that create an “imagined community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s oft-cited term) by focusing on the physical territory we call Quebec. The province stretches from its border with New Brunswick, Maine, and Vermont in the south to the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay in the north. It reaches from the Hudson and James bays in the west to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the disputed border with Newfoundland and Labrador in the east. Of this immense territory covering 1.7 million km2, only approximately 8 percent comprises privately owned land, including all urban and agricultural zones. The other 92 percent of the territory is the domain of the state— “Crown Land”—a vast territory variously ceded to logging companies, attributed to First Nations as reservations, and administered as parks or “ZECs” (zones d’exploitation contrôlée, government-managed hunting and fishing zones). More than half of Quebec’s total area is covered by forest.1 The “nature” that constitutes the majority of the territory called Quebec, however, cannot be understood as a simple space with a direct and literal relation to its inhabitants. As Bill Marshall points out in Quebec National Cinema, “nature” is always a discourse (2001, 241), a cultural construction. Each people narrates its own connection to the land it occupies, and this connection contributes to defining the nation and its members. The construction of Quebec as a nation has changed over time, as has the Québécois people’s understanding of their relation to the physical territory. Whereas a common conception of “traditional” settler Quebec rests on agricultural Catholic rurality, the growing emphasis, during the 20th century, on logging and industries linked to

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forestry could be said to have made the Québécois a “forest people.” Figures like the log-driver in Félix-Antoine Savard’s novel Menaud, maître draveur (Boss of the River, 1937), and the bûcheron [lumberjack] of Arthur Lamothe’s short film Bûcherons de la Manouane (1962) emerged as emblematic figures for the nation’s relation to the land, suggesting that working in, cutting down, and building from forests are key elements of Québécois settler identity.2 The boreal forest that accounts for most of the province’s wooded land relies on fire for its health and regeneration (Christianson et al., 2022; Gonzalez Bautista, 2016). Prior to the arrival of Europeans, First Nations peoples variously culled the forest through regular burnings, encouraging the growth of desirable pyrogenic flora and its accompanying fauna and shaping the forest to their agricultural and hunting needs.3 The decimation of Indigenous populations by European contact and the introduction of colonial fire-suppression laws radically altered cyclical burning patterns, allowing the forest to age and decay. Climatologists attribute the global Small Ice Age of the 16th through 19th centuries to the marked decrease in forest burning in the Americas (Scott, 2017). Colonizing Europeans’ approach to fire was paradoxical: they viewed it as dangerous but at the same time used it indiscriminately to clear land (Johnston, 2013). By the early 20th century, settler brush clearing and dynamite-assisted logging had begun to dramatically alter the forest again and had inadvertently reintroduced fire as a potentially uncontrollable destructive force. Burning practices have thus defined Quebec’s relation to the forest and shaped a national identity that presumes both control over and fear of this flammable resource. Forest fires feature as the backdrop in two recent Québécois films, Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down, Louise Archambault, 2019) and Avant les rues (Before the Streets, Chloé Leriche, 2016). The forest fires smoldering on the edge of both films’ narratives recall the recent fires that have plagued northern Canada, but despite their timeliness and contemporaneity, these films are retrospective. Both films look back to past fire cultures, albeit very different ones: a settler perspective in which fire represents the death of the forest and its replacement by humans, and a precolonial and resiliently extant Atikamekw perspective in which fire purifies and teaches. This chapter begins with a reading of Paul Gury’s films Un homme et son péché (A Man and His Sin, Paul Gury, 1949) and Séraphin (Seraphin, Paul Gury, 1950) about the colonization of Quebec in order to show the cinematic genealogy of Quebec’s “forest people” identity, and to explore how

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that settler orientation evolves in Archambault’s film and is modified in Leriche’s. The four films suggest that Québécois identity shifts from assuming authority over nature (both fire and forests), to fearing fire, to tenuously acknowledging that settler authority protects neither people nor wilderness. Séraphin: Fire and the Mission of Colonization Un homme et son péché and Séraphin provide an articulation of Quebec’s foundational identity myth with respect to land, forest, and fire, reconstructing 19th-century francophone colonial settlement through the lens of mid-20th-century nationalism. The films were based on Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché (1933), a short novel depicting settler mores in Quebec that has inspired multiple adaptations in various media. Grignon’s (and Gury’s) foundational myth locates settlers as masters of a harsh but ultimately rewarding agricultural land; forests represent an obstacle to cultivation, and fire constitutes a tool to clear land. Gury’s two films reflect on 1890s colonial efforts in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. They tell the story of a small group of settlers near the village of Sainte-Adèle, of which the avaricious Séraphin is mayor. In Un homme et son péché, the hero, Alexis Labranche, returns in the fall, having worked first at log-driving and then at a lumber yard—a “wood man” par excellence. He promptly loses his money in a drunken card game and is forced to borrow $300 from Séraphin, with his land, house, and belongings as guarantees. Alexis is unable to repay his debt despite his friends’ efforts to help him; he decides to marry the young Artémise and move to a new allotment to start anew. Séraphin, which takes up the story two years later, tracks Séraphin’s downfall. Alexis and Artémise have built a new cabin, are raising their first baby, and are clearing land. Their paperwork is in order, so Séraphin is unable to confiscate their land. Séraphin’s widowed sister, whom he has kept in the dark about their father’s death, returns from the United States for her share of the inheritance. The film ends with Séraphin weakened, hardly able to leave his bed, cursing money and those who have taken it from him. While the films revolve around the evils of avarice, they enmesh this morality lesson in a panegyric to francophone settler colonialism. Both films begin with images of forested landscape and contrast them to Alexis’s clearing of first one allotment and then a second. Alexis’s

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Fig. 4.1: Séraphin

surname, Labranche [the branch], associates him with the first task we see him undertake in Séraphin: arranging small branches into a fire in a corner of his cleared yard. The work is communal, and Alexis works with a group of men including his friend Jambe-de-Bois, a vagabond. “Jambe-de-Bois” means “wooden leg,” and the beggar jokes that the doctor would like to amputate his disabled leg to replace it with a wooden prosthesis. Through his name, Jambe-de-Bois, like Alexis, merges with the wood of the forest he helps cut down. Thus the film enacts the transformation of arboreal land into peopled land by assigning wooden names to its protagonists but masks that transformation, suggesting that the forest is still present even though its meaning is transferred into the human bodies that replace it. Artémise, named after the Greek goddess of wild animals, the hunt, vegetation, chastity, and child birth, articulates women’s reproductive labor contributing to the effort of settlement: “As trees fall, it’s children who replace them!”4 She imagines colonization as a process of building a human forest in a land previously peopled by trees. There is a fluidity between humanity and forest, leading to a vision of progress as a humanizing transformation. Alexis’s semantic connection to trees goes beyond his name. His first words in Séraphin are “Black birch!” (Bouleau noir!)—a frequent expletive of his. Alexis’s pronunciation of the swearword, which emphasizes the first syllable of bouleau and gives noir a long diphthong, naturalizes the

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expression as an almost meaningless string of sounds, yet his oath relies on tree imagery. While the black birch exists, it is not native to Quebec, where “birch” is synonymous with “white.” Alexis’s swearword thus gathers provocative force through oxymoronic opposition. As he exclaims “Bouleau noir!” in front of a blaze of branches and stumps, however, the idiom becomes an unironic descriptive of the work he is doing, blackening birches into cinders as he clears the land. The appearance of his wife Artémise with buckets of water harnessed to her shoulders further highlights the elemental nature of colonization. As Alexis first drinks from and then pours a bucket over his head, he accesses and uses both the heat of fire and the water that extinguishes it, emblems of the settler colony’s massive brush-clearing and well-drilling projects. The link between tree and settler is intimate. In Séraphin, the land-clearing scene that opens the film features a comic interaction between a drunken lumberjack and a stump. The man reels around the stump, sipping from his flask between tipsy strikes of his axe. To a mocking extradiegetic melody that lilts with his inebriated swaying, he sits down with his legs wrapped around the remains of the tree and holds it in a tight corps-à-corps. Finally, unaware that a sober companion has successfully loosened the stump, the drunkard falls over backward, cradling it in his arms. The slapstick interlude shows that men and trees are in an intimate struggle for survival: the men need the land for agriculture, which requires the death of the trees. Beyond this comic scene, however, clearing land for settlement is a serious, even holy, matter. The colonizing settlers are led into the forest by a fictionalized version of the real priest Antoine Labelle, nicknamed both “the king of the north” and “the apostle of colonization.”5 Labelle was an ardent proponent of francophone colonization, dreaming of a French and Catholic territorial “reconquest” that he privately expressed as a tranquil vengeance for the 18th-century defeat of the French by the British. Although his dreams of settling French-speaking colonizers in a string of Catholic parishes from Montreal to Winnipeg was never realized, he was responsible for the establishment of twenty or so isolated parishes in the Ottawa River Valley north of Montreal. Un homme et son péché and Séraphin, produced in the late 1940s, earnestly endorse Labelle’s dream. Following World War Two, Quebec rapidly industrialized and urbanized, threatening the continuity of its identity, which was traditionally associated with rurality. Gury’s films participate in the broad 1930s through 1950s neo-nationalist movements that strove to define a French-Canadian community anchored in

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francophone Catholic identity (Behiels, 1985). The first film opens with a masculine voice narrating the push for colonization as an extension of France: “Under the violent and so enthusiastic push of the Curé Labelle, who colonized the North fifty miles from Montreal, French Canadians, land clearers and ploughmen, authentic descendants of ancestors from Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Auvergne, and Île-de-France, courageous men, rolled back the forests to establish a civilization that would be the prolongation of old France.” Alexis’s brush burning is here metaphorized euphemistically as “rolling back [reculer] forests,” obscuring fire behind “authenticity” and “courage” as though those qualities alone clear land. And yet it is fire that makes settlement possible and that allows for the imagined “authentic” connection to French ancestors. The boundaries of Labelle’s new country blur with those of France, the francophone bond defining Quebec as a fire-forged transatlantic extension of the mother country. In addition to this ancestral link with France, francophone Canada asserts itself in contrast to its southern border: the Curé Labelle’s mission is represented as an attempt to stanch French-Canadian migration to the United States. When Alexis’s debt seems impossible to pay back, for instance, one of his options is to emigrate south. At the end of the first film, however, Alexis opts to set off further north, singing the French folk song “Gai lon la, gai le rosier,” melodically asserting the continuation of francophone culture in Quebec. Indeed, in 1949, when the film appeared, Quebec was in the process of redefining itself through song. La bonne chanson, a publishing enterprise that was tasked with preserving and spreading French-Canadian folkloric culture after the Quebec City 1937 French Language Congress, included songs such as “Gai lon la” in its collections (De Surmont, 2001). Alexis’s candid singing, heard even after he rides offscreen with Artémise and Jambe-de-Bois, represents the survival of a French culture demarcated from the anglophone United States to the south. “The Branch,” “Wooden Leg,” and the goddess of the hunt go north together, “forest people” going into the woods. They are heading into even less populated and more densely forested territory, continuing the transformation of the woods into French-speaking people. Un homme et son péché and Séraphin illustrate the moral continuum from evil to good against a background of forest imagery, creating their own colonial ethics. The ultimate moral standard in both films is Bill Wabo, an Indigenous man who appears at crucial plot points. Wabo opens Un homme et son péché standing next to an animal-skin house in the woods and declaiming, “Séraphin—mauvais, mauvais,”

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and “Alexis—bon homme!” Wabo’s morality, intimately linked to the forest (in Séraphin he emerges silently from among the trees as Alexis and Artémise enjoy a romantic tête-à-tête in the woods), exists beyond settler law. He counteracts Séraphin’s evil (“mauvais”) but lawful actions by going beyond the law, offering to take money from Séraphin’s attic to help Alexis repay Séraphin. For Wabo, the action is not stealing, since the money will return to Séraphin. The scheme (of which Alexis knows nothing) fails when Jambe-de-Bois, who is less convinced of the morality of the plan, confesses—but Wabo is never accused, and Jambe-de-Bois goes unpunished. Wabo, like the “Indigenous Other” described in Bill Marshall’s Quebec National Cinema, is a symbol of “pre- and non-capitalist cultures and structures of belief that are simultaneously marked by racial and ethnic difference […] and [of] the constitution of the modern nation itself […], the way in which a national ‘people’ can be constituted in a culture whose predecessor(s) are visible, adjacent, embedded, entwined, separate, or whatever” (2001, 242). Wabo, entwined with but separate from settler society, helps define the North American-ness of the settler community. By including but differentiating him, the community exists within Canada’s legal system and also beyond it, establishing its own moral touchstones in a way that is only possible through the radical difference of the “Indigenous Other.” Although Wabo’s trickster persona functions outside settler law, he ultimately serves as a moral compass that justifies that very law; the “forest people” of the province are thus descendants of France naturalized in a new, American moral order. By judging in favor of Alexis and supporting his claim to land ownership, Wabo seems to welcome settlement—the “good” kind of settlement represented by hardworking, forest-clearing Alexis. In historical fact, however, the Algonquin-Anishinaabe people who lived in the Laurentian region before settlers arrived fought for continued access to the territory and filed petitions for compensation for land occupied without their consent.6 By focusing on the moral opposition between good settler and bad settler, Gury’s films erase the history of land appropriation and replace it with a narrative that suggests Indigenous support for settlement. The films present Wabo and Alexis as contrasting types of “forest people,” where Alexis absorbs or reflects Wabo’s moral goodness in a way that transfers legitimacy to “good settlement.” Ultimately, Un homme et son péché and Séraphin support white francophone colonization—a local variant of the “white possessive” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015)—and in the process set up a definition of the

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Québécois man as a figure who works hard, is morally good because he works the land, and masters the use of fire to improve the land. Alexis Labranche’s ease as he walks the land, his name, which naturalizes his belonging among the trees, and the seeming speed with which he settles not one but two allotments are part and parcel of his moral goodness. The films thus oppose Séraphin’s loansharking to Alexis’s generosity and hard work. Séraphin’s “Dominion bills” (he is the only one to refer to piastres this way, highlighting his alliance with an anglophone settler capitalist system) represent a perversion of the forest—green, made from trees, but so distant from the land that they have lost all connection to it. Alexis’s connection to the forest, however, is intimate and virtuous: clearing land, burning stumps and branches, and building cabins of tree trunks purifies Alexis’s soul. The films suggest that the smoke of the fires he sets and the exhaustion of the work channel his energies productively towards the zealous goals of the Curé Labelle. In this way, the forest that the settlers are so eager to cut down and burn in Un homme et son péché and Séraphin is represented as intricately linked to their identity. “Bad” settlers, like Séraphin, turn trees into money, but “good” settlers, like Alexis, take the forest landscape into their bodies by working on (and destroying) it. The films suggest that retrospectively, from a mid-20th-century perspective, the colonization of the Laurentians has defined the Québécois people as a people of the forest, rooted in the land they “discovered” and occupied only a few decades earlier. Their identification with trees—even though the settlers did their best to eradicate them on their allotments—naturalizes colonization and makes it seem organic. It also erases previous human occupancy of the land, suggesting that Québécois settlers acquired the land from the trees themselves rather than seizing another people’s territory. In this way, Gury’s films reaffirm the “settlement thesis” that underlies Canadian law, which assumes Indigenous lands are terra nullius [nobody’s land] and which takes for granted that “the sovereignty of the ‘modern’ state will always trump ‘customary’ or ‘common-law’ Indigenous rights” (Mackey, 2016, 9–10).7 The images of burning branches that open both films thus represent Quebec’s settler identity as a “forest people” that exists by eradicating forests, an identity based on the erasure of Indigenous presence, a sense of entitlement to land and resources, and moral approbation for land-clearing activities.8

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Il pleuvait des oiseaux: Settler Fire Reconsidered By the 2010s, Quebec’s “forest people” identity had shifted from the figure of the rural land-clearer to that of the cottage vacationer. As an important segment of Quebec’s rural population migrated to towns, suburbs, and cities from the 1940s to the 1960s in search of better education and more profitable employment (Behiels, 1985), the Québécois myth of identification with the forest continued by linking urbanites to “nature” through the cottage industry and outdoor leisure activities. Il pleuvait des oiseaux, Louise Archambault’s 2019 feature film based on Jocelyne Saucier’s 2011 novel of the same title, updates Gury and Grignon’s myth-building vision of Québécois settler identity in relation to forest and fire by imagining a group of former city-dwellers seeking permanent refuge in the woods. In this film, forests represent a retreat from society, and fire, a threat. The story unfolds in the 1990s. It is set, however, against the backdrop of the early-20th-century “Great Fires,” three devastating fires that nearly wiped out several mine towns in northeastern Ontario and northwestern Quebec between 1911 and 1922. Raf, short for Rafaëlle, a thirty-something photographer hired by a local museum to interview and photograph local survivors of the Great Fires (represented in the film through black-and-white footage of flames that fill the screen entirely, as in the screenshot below), meets Steve, the young manager of L’hôtel du ruisseau, a mostly deserted luxury resort built by the son of a millionaire who had hoped the region would become “the new Klondike”—an extractivist pipedream representing settler capitalist investment. Steve has been quietly providing supplies to a community of three elderly

Fig. 4.2: Il pleuvait des oiseaux

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recluses, selling the products of their small marijuana plantation while keeping their location secret. This community of hermits becomes the central focus of the film: Ted Boychuk, a survivor of the Great Fires who dies “de sa belle mort”—a natural death—as the film opens; Tom, a singer and guitar player addicted to drink; and Charlie, “a miraculous cancer survivor” who was, decades ago, given only a few months to live. Into this masculine universe enters Marie-Desneiges, Steve’s aunt, whom Steve rescues from a life of unjustified psychiatric imprisonment. Raf wishes to find the hermits because she wants to interview and photograph Ted, a legend among survivors of the Great Fires as the boy who lost his entire family and wandered for days, burned and injured. She manages to locate the hermits a few days after Ted’s death and finds hundreds of his paintings of the fire, which she eventually incorporates into her exhibition along with her own photos and interviews. Gentle romances develop between Raf and Steve on the one hand and Charlie and Marie-Desneiges on the other, but forest fires bring the region under police scrutiny and force the dispersal of the small community. Tom commits suicide, as he has been preparing to do for years, and Steve simply disappears from the film. The exhibition of Raf’s photos and Ted’s paintings in a local museum is a success, and Charlie and Marie-Desneiges begin a new life in a small country house. Forest fire plays several thematic roles in Il pleuvait. The Great Fires bring the little community together: Raf’s interviews and search for Ted bring her to the region and to the forest refuge, and her presence there facilitates Marie-Desneiges’s acclimatization to life in the woods. Contemporary fires, by contrast, threaten the hermit community and eventually lead to its disintegration, just as the Great Fires led to the destruction of early 20th-century towns. It is interesting to note that the contemporary forest fire that threatens the recluses’ refuge is not part of the novel on which the film is based. One of several important differences between the novel and film, the introduction of contemporary wildfires brings a sense of continuity between Canada’s settler past and the present. As a work of cinema, Il pleuvait commemorates the Great Fires and participates, in parallel with Raf’s exhibition, in the creation of a collective memory about the catastrophic events that defined early settlement in the region. The film is anchored in a nostalgic affirmation of francophone Québécois settler identity, recuperating memories of past disasters and linking them to the present, ascribing to the Québécois persona the qualities of fortitude, melancholy survival, and wilderness knowhow. Forest fire is constructed in Il pleuvait as

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a force of nature—an unexplainable, almost divine force that, as one survivor puts it, lights the horizon in a bright golden glow and causes birds to fall from the sky (the title of Raf’s exhibition as well as of the film). The nation that is subjected to this extraordinary force of nature and survives it appears destined to occupy the land: survival implies a natural right to the territory, an implication supported by the continued presence of the Great Fires’ survivors in the region. The film, however, elides several important facts about the Great Fires: their causes, their cartographical location, the Indigenous peoples who inhabit the territory and who were present before it became a mining region, and the logging that has plagued the forest since the fires. Let us examine each of these. First, the film elides the Great Fires’ link to human actions. Il pleuvait focuses on the survivors’ traumatic stories of escaping, while the fires’ origins go uninvestigated. And yet the history of the Great Fires has been documented: the conflagrations were started by settlers clearing fields and setting fire to brush piles, as Séraphin’s characters do. As Michael Barnes records, at first “there was no general alarm […] Fire was seen to be commonplace in Northern development” (1987, 14). Clearing land to mine, build, farm, and lay roads and railroads meant using fire so frequently that its smell and smoke had become routine. Only when the fires were whipped into immense infernos by unexpected winds did the settler population begin to worry. Il pleuvait, in its focus on the fires’ effects on survivors, erases their origin in technologies of settlement. Today, contemporary fires are deeply linked to human contact, settler culture, and federal and provincial policy. Following the Great Fires of the early 20th century, the Canadian government and its provincial counterparts adopted a rigidly anti-fire approach to forests, emphasizing fire prevention and, when prevention fails, military-style suppression and evacuation (Lake and Christianson, 2019). Because of government policy, forests age and offer more fuel to lightning-strike fires than they would have if they had been allowed smaller, more frequent burns. Climate change, also caused by human activity, heightens the intensity of dryness and heat even as it reduces snow and rainfall, increasing the frequency and size of forest fires (Gonzalez Bautista, 2016). Large wildfires, such as the one that threatens the hermits’ forest refuge in Il pleuvait, thus result indirectly from human activity. If settler brushclearing fires caused the Great Fires, settler activity and settler-state fire policies create contemporary wildfires. The film, however, by presenting forest fires as a force of nature, elides their link to settler colonialism.

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Another significant elision in Il pleuvait is the erasure of the space beyond the border of Quebec. Whereas Gury’s films defined Quebec against its southern border, bemoaning the migration of impoverished francophones into the United States to find work, Il pleuvait constructs Quebec as simultaneously infinite and borderless. In fact, however, the Great Fires, like many contemporary wildfires, straddled the OntarioQuebec border.9 Fire follows winds and fuel availability, and forests generally transcend administrative borders, exposing the arbitrariness of any nation’s narrative alignment with this natural feature. In an interview for Radio-Canada’s ICI Ontario, Archambault (2019) mentions that she meant for Il pleuvait to celebrate the mix of cultures at the Ontario-Quebec border, and yet the film appears to be set in an insular francophone Québécois world.10 Signage and language reinforce this impression. When Steve collects his aunt from her psychiatric residence, labeled only in French as “Soins Longue Durée—Psychiatrie,” they also drive past a blue Quebec tourism sign that reads “Bonjour! Région touristique de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue.” The characters, despite their English-sounding names (Tom, Charlie, Raf, Steve, Marjie), all speak French with native-speaker pronunciation and intonation. Ted Boychuck, the elusive and mostly silent painter who dies in the opening minutes, is anglophone, but by replacing Ted’s voice with his paintings for the remainder of the film, Il pleuvait creates a purely francophone world. By thus focusing on French speakers, the film reduces the important negotiations about who belongs on the land to just two parties (francophone settlers and fire), erasing other settlers and Indigenous people, and stressing the connection between Québécois land and these specific individuals. The outsider statuses of the protagonists—pot growers, alcoholic, institutionalized for mental illness, survivors of childhood trauma, failing to support an aspirational tourism economy—unites them in the insular francophone nature of the world the film creates. Il pleuvait constructs an incomplete vision of the settler situation, performing two more elisions. By suggesting that the forest was empty prior to the arrival of the settlers in the early 20th century and the recluses in the late 20th century, Il pleuvait erases the presence, both historical and contemporary, of the Algonquin people, an aspect of the film that critics have yet to interpret. The Algonquin—also recognized as a nation—sustainably altered and inhabited the forest now called AbitibiTémiscamingue before it became a “touristic region.” Their erasure from the landscape is an extension of what Audra Simpson identifies as the “foretold cultural and political death” (2014, 3) of Indigenous

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people imagined, over centuries, by colonial settlers. Settlers conceived of the land as empty (terra nullius) and, in an unacknowledged paradox, simultaneously foretold the imminent disappearance of Indigenous peoples (Simpson, 2014; O’Brien, 2010), laying the groundwork for massive dispossession based on an ontology of invisibility (Witgen, 2012) and forgetting (Morrill et al., 2016). Il pleuvait carries this double erasure into the 20th and 21st centuries, building on and perpetuating a settler myth of innocence deeply entangled in the violence of colonization. Connected to the absence of the Algonquin is another: that of logging. When Steve gives Raf directions to get her lost in the woods in order to prevent her from finding the hermits’ refuge, he warns her about the old “routes forestières,” the defunct logging roads left behind by timber harvesters. Aside from this passing reference, however, logging is erased from Il pleuvait: the film presents the woods as a healthy, mature forest, not a patchwork of clear-cuts. It opens with a long shot of the misty boreal forest surrounding the lake and stretching as far as the eye can see, suggesting that nature is entirely untouched. In fact, however, in the early to mid-20th century, Abitibi was the paper producing capital of the world, and clear-cutting was established in the 1980s and 1990s as the norm, as songwriter-activist Richard Desjardins denounces in L’erreur boréale, a 1999 documentary exposing the over-exploitation of the boreal forest.11 These absences—of the First Nations and of the destruction of the forest—idealize the forest as simultaneously pristine and empty, still and always awaiting human contact, a green jewel warranting stringent fire-suppression laws. Il pleuvait des oiseaux is a curious film. It recuperates while simultaneously mystifying settler colonial history, highlighting the Great Fires and yet avoiding the fact that they were caused by settler carelessness. It constructs the idea of a Québécois francophone nation around an incident that crossed geographical and linguistic borders. It idealizes a primeval, untouched forest, effacing the continuing presence of First Nations peoples and the industries that have contributed to displacing them from their ancestral lands. It is true that the film critiques the normative mores of French settler society by finding fault with Marie-des-Neiges’s psychiatric internment. Beyond this, however, the oblique reference to Richard Desjardins’s activism is the only element that unsettles the film’s coherence as a story idealizing life (and death) in the purity of Quebec’s forest. The national identity that emerges from the film is a nostalgic and hopeful vision of continuity between a younger generation and

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its elders, establishing a long-lasting francophone Québécois people as the natural inhabitants of the land. The series of paradoxes that opens this paragraph, however, suggests that this national identity is not as naturally settled in the land as the film seems to imply; that neither the young nor the old settler generation is entitled to Quebec’s forests; that the police force that ousts the hermits is no more legitimate than they are; and that the art (Ted’s, Raf’s, Archambault’s) illustrating and narrating this tenuous hold on land recounts absence as much as presence. Avant les rues and Quebec’s Inner Borders The 2016 feature film Avant les rues, shot in the Atikamekw community of Manawan in the Haute-Mauricie region, offers a contrast to Un homme et son péché, Séraphin, and Il pleuvait des oiseaux. The film is directed by Chloé Leriche, a descendant of European settlers, but, as she explains, she made an effort to work with the Atikamekw actors and community to represent them as they wanted to be represented.12 The fact that the film is in Atikamekw updates Bill Marshall’s understanding of Quebec national cinema as francophone (2001, x), and it highlights the multiplicity of nations that in fact exist on the territory called Quebec. In addition, Avant les rues presents a different set of associations linking Québécois national identity with the forest, showing rather than hiding its destruction. Avant les rues tells the story of the teenage Shawnouk (played by Rykko Bellemare), who must come to terms with a murder he accidentally commits, and his family, as they witness him lose hope, attempt suicide, and then struggle to heal. Leriche’s film creates a dual setting, opposing the richly shadowed and humid forest filled with the calls of the hermit thrush, to the dusty, treeless streets of the reservation, bordered with identical gray, mass-produced houses. Across these starkly contrasted settings, the film reveals complex fire cultures that negotiate different relationships between humans and forests. Before European colonization, First Nations peoples used regular controlled burns “to survive, adapt to local environmental conditions, promote desired habitats and species, and increase the abundance of favored resources and landscape conditions” (Lake and Christianson, 2019, 1). Frequent planned burning reduced fuel loading, increased fire-adapted vegetation, and created a mosaic of different habitats, which combined to reduce the threat of uncontrolled wildfires near

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human corridors and habitations (2). Anthropologist Noémie Gonzalez’s work on the 2010 wildfire at Wemotaci suggests that the Atikamekw of the Haute-Mauricie historically practiced this type of controlled burning (2011, 33). With colonization and European settlement, however, Indigenous fire regimes were severely diminished. On one level, genocide, forced relocation, and the outlawing of Indigenous fire practices almost entirely suppressed controlled burns. On another, settler fire suppression is precisely what has made forests susceptible to dangerous wildfires that require evacuation (Kimmerer and Lake, 2001). A fictionalized version of the 2010 Wemotaci fire13 forms the backdrop of Shawnouk’s coming-of-age story. “Wemotaci is burning,” his sister Kwena whispers worriedly at the opening of the film. Wemotaci, located 130 km to the north, is Manawan’s sister reservation. Shawnouk responds, “I know. I hear everyone was evacuated.” His response is half in Atikamekw, half in French: “Y’ont évacué tout le monde” stands out from the rest of the dialogue, drawing attention to Shawnouk’s use of French to refer to the process of emergency evacuation. As it turns out, the language combination was probably Bellemare’s own decision. The scenario of Avant les rues was first written in French by Chloé Leriche, who outlined the plot. The dialogues were then translated by the actors, who are bilingual in Atikamekw and French.14 The decision to retain “Y’ont évacué tout le monde” in French suggests that while this concept could have been expressed in Atikamekw, it is strongly linked to the language of the settlers who introduced the practice as a response to the wildfires their policies caused.15 Bellemare’s half-translation symbolizes the cultural connection between wildfires that require evacuation and settler perspectives, policies, and ways of living, a connection that is reinforced by the French-language broadcasts about the evacuation that appear on television sets in Avant les rues. Not only did settler colonization create the conditions for life-threatening wildfires, but it also introduced a separation between tending the forests with fire and tending human life with fire, following the European philosophical tradition of separating humans from the rest of the natural world (Kimmerer, 2013). As scenes from Avant les rues illustrate, fire is part of First Nations ceremonial life, and ceremonial fire is not far removed from Indigenous forestry fire regimes. The two are part of a spectrum of cultural practices that sustain subsistence practices, health, and knowledge (Lake and Christianson, 2019). Several scenes in Avant les rues feature deliberately set fires, and their resulting smoke and steam, as elements of spiritual healing. Around the fire at a sweat lodge on Wolf Island, a healer

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sprinkles fire-heated rocks (called “grandfathers” in the subtitles) with water, and Shawnouk joins a discussion that helps him understand his place in society. Shawnouk reassesses the crime that haunts him within a network of community priorities and values in which each story is worth hearing, each difficulty worth solving. The community members bring him wisdom, while simultaneously the steam from the “grandfather” stones brings physical healing; natural elements resemble people, but in a different way from the wood-named settler characters in Gury’s films. After the conversation, in a visually dramatic scene that appears on the film’s poster, the healer wafts smoke over Shawnouk’s bare torso amid a stand of boreal firs in a cleansing ceremony in which wisps of smoke purify and elevate the spirit. Shawnouk is filmed from the side, standing with the trees, highlighting their common verticality; his arms spread outward like their branches. Ritual uses of fire suggestively make him more a part of the forest. When the film contrasts frightening images of wildfires on French-language television to peaceful scenes of ritual fire use, it unsettles a lynchpin of Québécois settler identity by replacing the fear of fire with the healthy use of it. Avant les rues, in effect, makes visible the “inner borders” of the Québécois nation. The film reminds us that Quebec is not a homogeneous unilingual and unicultural whole, and that its heterogeneity does not necessarily stem from its geographical borders with Ontario and the United States. An important part of the cultural variation that Avant les rues underscores is the relation to forest and fire. When Shawnouk flees the reservation after committing accidental murder, he goes to ground in the woods; we see long shots of him wandering through a forest that dwarfs him. As the camera occasionally loses him behind tree trunks, we

Fig. 4.3: Avant les rues

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focus on bird songs and stillness until he reappears. The forest is filmed as a character itself. This first flight and his subsequent healing journey to Wolf Island take Shawnouk away from the uniform grayness of the dusty reservation into a colorful living forest. Unlike Il pleuvait des oiseaux, however, this film does not present the forest as consistently pristine and untouched; one of the scenes takes place on a logging road bordered by bare brown earth and the horizontal gray remnants of trees, and still other scenes take place in a sand quarry on the edge of town. Avant les rues acknowledges the transformations that have changed the forest, both on the reservation and on these resource-extraction sites. The film shows the effects of the streets on the forest, the effects of a system organized around streets and around their potential for circulating goods and people. The title Avant les rues has been interpreted as referring to the deep astronomical time described by a Hubert Reeves recording that Shawnouk steals during the robbery that ends in accidental murder (Marshall, 2018). But Shawnouk is frustrated with Reeves’s philosophical musings: after hearing the soft woman’s voice recite in French the fact that the blackness of night proves that the universe is finite, he presses the “stop” button on the tape player, pulls off the earphones, gets up, and screams inarticulately and angrily as he kicks an unseen object and throws a blue water tank. And in fact, the Atikamekw title of the film translates as Le tambour avant les rues (Fetz, 2016). The “before the streets” to which the film refers is therefore not so far removed as the beginning of astronomical time; it refers to the rhythm of Atikamekw life before Europeans lay streets through their ancestral land. As Leriche explains, “when you go to a native community, you need to drive for a long time. The reserves are far from the streets and not easy to get to. The community where they come from is not too far from the city, it’s about an hour, but an hour on a road that is quite dangerous” (Fetz, 2016). The film conveys the transformation wrought by streets at the same time as it reveals the rhythm of life on ancestral land. (Le tambour) Avant les rues presents us with the type of landscape that facilitates different relationships to fire than the ones allowed by colonial policy. The film peoples the supposedly empty spaces, which tells us that “avant les rues” does not equate to “before people”; it shows the Atikamekw inhabiting the land, before and after colonization, in a spatialization that enacts, justifies, and sustains their presence (Barnd, 2017, 4). The geography of Shawnouk’s healing, from the dust of the reservation through the wet verdure of the forest to the smoke at the Wolf Island retreat, inscribes him in “precolonial epistemologies,

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ontologies, and practices” that show the enduring incompleteness of the colonial project (Barnd, 2017, 5). Before the streets there was a drum, and the drum continues to sound after the streets are carved into the land, as Shawnouk’s drum opens and closes the film. The forest represented in Avant les rues is not the untouched forest of Il pleuvait des oiseaux, nor is it the disappearing forest ceding to agricultural encroachment depicted in Gury’s films. Instead, Avant les rues shows there was an earlier peopled time before the streets, when humans altered the landscape but not with the purpose of “rolling back the forests,” as in Gury’s films. The scarification represented by European logging and colonial roads means a new regime of forest and fire management; the streets symbolize the imposition of a European dichotomy separating humans from nature and defining the forest as a resource rather than a living place—a place in which to live that is itself alive. The film imagines humans inhabiting land not as masters as in Gury’s films or interlopers in Archambault’s, but rather as mutually responsible parts of a symbiotic whole. Conclusion Contrasting the representation of forests and fires in Paul Gury’s mid-century dramas to those in Louise Archambault’s and Chloé Leriche’s contemporary films raises important questions about the significance of settler colonization in Québécois cultural-geographical memory. While Gury’s films elevate the difficulty of settler quotidian life into a founding myth, with the virgin forest as the settler’s predecessor, Archambault’s film begins to problematize Canada’s (and Quebec’s) settlement methods by focusing on disasters that impeded it—without, however, revealing these disasters’ roots in colonial settlement. Il pleuvait des oiseaux naturalizes Québécois presence on the territory, masking its destructiveness and eliding the early and continuing presence of First Nations peoples. The nationalism of Un homme et son péché, Séraphin, and Il pleuvait des oiseaux does not “completely close in on itself” (Baillargeon and Bertrand, 2019, 138)—the migration of French Canadians to the United States and the cross-border Great Fires of the early 20th century remind us of the porosity of Quebec’s cultural and geographical borders. And yet these three films strive to invent and preserve the myth of a unified and definitely bounded culture. To be Québécois, they suggest, is to think in absolutes: to believe that one belongs to a single, homogenous nation that controls forests and guards against fire.

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Leriche’s film, by contrast, offers a much more complex picture of how settler colonization has transformed the territory and problematizes the province’s supposed national uniformity. Gury’s and Archambault’s films feature the territory as something to be possessed—or not possessed, as Alexis Labranche is unable to retain his first allotment and as the hermits in Il pleuvait des oiseaux are forced to leave the land they do not own. Avant les rues suggests the possibility instead of human belonging to land. Land here is not presented as an obstacle or as a cache for exploitable resources; it escapes the extractive logic of settlement. In fact, as part of his healing, Shawnouk is taught to hew down dead trees (which is also fire mitigation), thanking each one of them for allowing him to release his anger through vigorous action. He does not envision replacing the trees he fells with humans or with their houses. He simply establishes a connection to the land that enables him to come to terms with his guilt, his frustration, and his sense of isolation. The gesture of thanking the tree for helping alleviate his anger suggests reciprocity, a relationship of mutual belonging indicating an irreducible and specific connection with the land. Avant les rues reminds us of Quebec’s inner borders between settlers and First Nations, and of the porosity of the province’s culture. The startling accidental murder that propels the action of the film, together with the poverty and unemployment that led to it and the intrusion of the provincial police in its investigation, reminds us of the violence that permeates settler colonialism despite settler myths of innocence and belonging, showing the perpetuation of this violence in contemporary political, economic, and cultural life. And yet the collaborative nature of the film’s production and translation, Leriche working closely with the communities she features, provides hope that Québécois identity could encompass multiple, overlapping nations and learn or relearn less destructive relationships to the forest. Acknowledgments I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable advice as well as Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt, Kate Aid, Noémie Gonzalez, PhD in anthropology from the Université Laval, Sylvie Létourneau of the Services documentaires of the Atikamekw Nation Council, Samuel Castonguay, forest engineer for the Atikamekw Nation Council, and Stephen Wyatt of the Université de Moncton School of Forestry.

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Works Cited “Algonquin Petition of August 1847.” Algonquins of Ontario. 2013. https:// www.tanakiwin.com /algonquins-of-ontario/our-proud-history/ algonquin-petition-of-1847/. Archambault, Louise. “Il pleuvait des oiseaux, un film lumineux de Louise Archambault.” ICI Ontario, Radio Canada (7 September 2019). https:// ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1291069/il-pleuvait-des-oiseaux-louisearchambault-tiff. Asch, Michael. “From Terra Nullius to Affirmation: Reconciling Aboriginal Rights with the Canadian Constitution.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 17.2 (2002): 23–39. Audet, Isabelle. “Hier, c’était vert.” La Presse (28 May 2010). Baillargeon, Mercédès and Karine Bertrand. “Introduction: le transnationalisme du cinéma et des (nouveaux) médias: le contexte québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 137–150. Barnd, Natchee Blu. Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017. Barnes, Michael. Killer in the Bush: The Great Fires of Northeastern Ontario. Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 1987. Behiels, Michael D. Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985. Bertrand, Karine. “Le cinéma autochtone au Québec: de la représentation à la ré-appropriation.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 221–240. Christianson, Amy Cardinal, Colin Robert Sutherland, Faisal Moola, Noémie Gonzalez Bautista, David Young, Heather MacDonald. “Centering Indigenous Voices: The Role of Fire in the Boreal Forest of North America.” Current Forestry Reports 8 (2022): 257–276. Desloges, Josianne. “Festival du cinéma de Québec: ‘Il pleuvait des oiseaux’ ouvrira le bal.” Le Droit (6 August 2019). De Surmont, Jean-Nicholas. La bonne chanson: le commerce de la tradition en France et au Québec dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Montreal: Tryptique, 2001. Di Gangi, Peter. “Algonquin Territory.” Canada’s History (30 April 2018). https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/algonquin-territory. Dussault, Gabriel. Le Curé Labelle: messianisme, utopie et colonisation au Québec 1850–1900. Montreal: Hurtubise H.M.H., 1983. Fetz, Lia. “2016 Berlinale Interview: Chloé Leriche—Avant les rues/Before the Streets.” Indiewood/Hollywood (21 February 2016).

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Gonzalez, Noémie. “Étude d’un feu de forêt et de ses conséquences sociales et écologiques au sein de Nitaskinan en Mauricie (Québec, Canada).” Master’s Thesis, Université Laval, 2011. Gonzalez Bautista, Noémie. “Les feux de forêt: des phénomènes sociaux.” L’interdisciplinaire 11 (2016): 7. Johnston, Dan. “The Ecological History of Forest Fires in Ontario.” Forestory: Forest History Society of Ontario 4.1 (Spring 2013): 1–2. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013. Kimmerer, Robin Wall and Frank Kanawha Lake. “The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management.” Journal of Forestry 99.11 (2001): 36–41. Krätli, Graziano. “Review: Il pleuvait des oiseaux by Jocelyne Saucier.” World Literature Today 86.4 (July/August 2012): 62–63. Lake, Frank K. and Amy Cardinal Christianson. “Indigenous Fire Stewardship.” Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Ed. S. L. Manzello. Cham: Springer, 2019. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_225-1. Lazic, Elena. “Interview: Chloé Leriche on Before the Streets and Indigenous Cinema.” Seventh Row. 24 February 2016. https://seventh-row. com/2016/02/24/before-the-streets/. Lowman, Emma Battell and Adam J. Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Halifax: Fernwood, 2015. Mackey, Eva. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization. Halifax: Fernwood, 2016. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. ——. “Worlds within: In the World.” Cinéma-monde: Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Eds. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 323–335. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Morrill, Angie, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Collective. “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 12.1 (2016): 1–20. O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pyne, Stephen J. Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. Rotz, Sarah. “‘They Took Our Beads, It Was a Fair Trade, Get Over It’: Settler Colonial Logics, Racial Hierarchies and Material Dominance in Canadian Agriculture.” Geoforum 82 (2017): 158–169.

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Savard, Félix-Antoine. Menaud maître draveur. Quebec: Garneau, 1937. Scott, James. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Border of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Filmography Archambault, Louise, dir. Il pleuvait des oiseaux. 2019. Chilton, Steven, dir. Le feu qui a noirci notre été. 2015. https://vimeo.com/ 157300694. Desjardins, Richard and Robert Monderie, dirs. L’erreur boréale. 1999. ——, dirs. Le peuple invisible. 2007. ——, dirs. Trou Story. 2011. Gury, Paul, dir. Un homme et son péché. 1949. ——, dir. Séraphin. 1950. Lamothe, Arthur, dir. Bûcherons de la Manouane. 1962. Leriche, Chloé, dir. Avant les rues. 2016. Wapikoni Mobile, dir. Au feu. 2010. https://vimeo.com/162428738.

Notes 1. See “Portraits de Québec” on the website of Quebec’s Ministère de l’énergie et des ressources naturelles, https://www.quebec.ca/gouv/portrait-quebec/. 2. I use the term “Québécois settler identity” to trouble the often-naturalized occupation of the land by generations of white colonists. See Lowman and Barker (2015) on the useful discomfort of the word “settler.” 3. Pyne (2007, 7) argues that as ice withdrew from the North American territory at the end of the Ice Age, the landscape was shaped significantly by anthropogenic fire. Thus there is no “pre-human-contact” forest in Canada; the landscape found by European explorers and invaders in the 16th century had always already been managed. 4. All translations are my own. 5. For a biography of Labelle and a clear-headed evaluation of his accomplishments, see Dussault (1983). 6. See, for example, Di Gangi (2018) or the “Algonquin Petition of August 1847” (2013). For an analysis of the history of racialized dispossession of Indigenous peoples by farmer-settlers, see Rotz (2017).

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7. For an examination of Canada’s laws in relation to the concept of terra nullius, see Asch (2002). For a discussion of terra nullius and the “Doctrine of Discovery” as they affected Indigenous fire cultures, see Christianson et al. (2022, 259). 8. Mackey defines “settler entitlement” as “a longstanding, structured, collective privilege […] socially legitimized as a ‘right’ to land” (2016, 9). 9. The Great Fires were most severe in anglophone communities in northeastern Ontario, not in francophone communities in western Quebec. Michael Barnes’s detailed history of the Great Fires occasionally mentions the fact that the fire crossed into Quebec, but for the most part, they destroyed settlements developing along the course of the newly built Ontario Northland Railway. 10. It is interesting to note that the source novel by Saucier was reviewed by one world literature critic as being a Québécois novel about Ontario narrated in a European style (Krätli, 2012). The film, however, was received as a film about Quebec: Bill Bilodeau, director of programming for the Festival de Cinéma de la Ville de Québec, stated that the film “showcases the incredible and unique landscape of Quebec” (Desloges, 2019), reading the francophone forest setting, depicted by a Québécois director, as distinctly and definitively Québécois. Locating the setting and context of Il pleuvait seems to be, at least in part, determined by the perspective of the reader/viewer. 11. Richard Desjardins’s documentaries’ denunciation of the extractivist logic of Canadian settlement form the unspoken framework of Il pleuvait des oiseaux. See also Le peuple invisible (2007), detailing the effects of European colonization on the Algonquin people, and Trou Story (2011), on the history of mining in Canada. In Il pleuvait, Tom sings Desjardins’s “Et j’ai couché dans mon char,” a song about the destructiveness of the mining industry, outlining the opposition between industry and the “natural” settlers in the hermit community. 12. See Bertrand (2019, 239), who uses Avant les rues as an example of a successful settler-Indigenous collaboration. 13. For information on the real 2010 Wemotaci fire, see Wapikoni Mobile’s film Au feu (2010), Audet (2010), and Gonzalez (2011). 14. See Lazic (2016): “They themselves [the actors] translated their own dialogue into their language so that the words could be truly theirs.” 15. It is interesting to contrast Bellemare’s translation choices to Steven Chilton’s short film, Le feu qui a noirci notre été (2015). The man narrating the 1997 fire that also threatened Wemotaci speaks Atikamekw (subtitled). When he describes “le plan d’évacuation” and “l’équipe d’évacuation,” however, he uses French, seemingly as markers of terms that were used to interface with non-Indigenous officials. When he discusses “measures of evacuation” decided on by the Atikamekw council, he uses Atikamekw.

chapter five

“Buddies” to the Rescue The Transnational Redefinition of Quebec Popular Cinema in the 21st Century Stéfany Boisvert “Buddies” to the Rescue

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Quebec film industry has faced unprecedented challenges. While domestic films have typically captured a significant proportion of box office revenues (Véronneau, 2006), the share of Hollywood productions has increased dramatically since 2010. Box office revenues for domestic films even hit historic lows in 2012 and 2016 (Tremblay, 2017). It goes without saying that the rise of OTT streaming platforms also weakened the local film industry, as it encouraged people to watch (mostly non-Québécois) films at home— especially since foreign platforms Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ hold the top three positions for subscriptions in Quebec (ATN, 2022, 13). Consequently, even though some Quebec productions are distributed on streaming platforms, the hegemony of American SVOD services undeniably affects the visibility and profitability of Quebec films.1 In this context, the Quebec film industry has great hopes for its “summer flicks,” popular films that are conceived to be the biggest box office hits in the province. The industry also relies on the production of sequels of its most popular films. Quebec summer flicks, which are clearly influenced by transnational genres, also feature well-known local media personalities. The combination of transnational genre templates with local stars has helped some summer flicks become the highest-grossing films of the province, sometimes even surpassing the box office revenues of Hollywood blockbusters (Demers, 2017). And yet, apart from the work of a few scholars (Liz Czach, Bill Marshall, Miléna Santoro, André Loiselle), research on Quebec cinema has usually shied away from the

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highest-grossing films, focusing instead on “auteur films” such as those of Sébatien Pilote, Xavier Dolan, Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Marc Vallée, and Denis Côté. As I aim to demonstrate in this chapter, studying Quebec popular cinema and, most notably, its “summer flicks,” is incredibly useful, as it allows us to better understand how a small industry is attempting to counter the hegemony of Hollywood.2 By “popular cinema,” I refer to films that target and attract the biggest audiences, in opposition to most auteur or art-house films (Loiselle, 1998, 2019; Marshall, 2001; Tinkcom and Villarejo, 2001, 12).3 Even though they “function outside the parameters usually accepted as legitimate criteria to evaluate cinematic quality” (Loiselle, 1998, 75), and are therefore, for this very reason, devalued by scholars, Quebec popular films reveal the themes, values, and identity discourses that are prevalent within the nation, as well as the archetypes that are currently central to its collective imagination. As Bill Marshall rightfully argued: [M]uch is at stake symbolically as well as economically in the enterprise that is Quebec commercial cinema. Popular cinema provides some of the clearest sources of visual and aural recognition of “Quebec”; indeed, one of the distinctions of the popular as opposed to art or auteurist work is its intertextual connections with other spoken entertainment forms. (2001, 173)

To contribute to a better understanding of Quebec’s redefinition of its popular cinema in the 21st century, this chapter will focus on five of the most successful local comedy films and box office hits of the past two decades: Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 (Érik Canuel, 2006; Alain Desrochers, 2017), De père en flic and De père en flic 2 (Father and Guns and Father and Guns 2, Émile Gaudreault, 2009, 2017), and Menteur (Compulsive Liar, Émile Gaudreault, 2019). As Marshall reminds us, “Comedy is the popular genre par excellence in that it constructs a shared experience, a community of laughter, and is highly participatory” (2001, 187). The analysis of these five comedies will show how Quebec popular films borrow from transnational generic conventions (action-comedy films, buddy movies), and more crucially, are always caught in a productive tension with Hollywood genre films, simultaneously trying to associate and distinguish themselves from so-called “American” films. The analysis will also highlight these films’ central concern with the transformation of gender relations and, most notably, the figure of the everyman.

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Bon Cop, Bad Cop: The Rise of the “Ordinary” Hero One of the highest-grossing domestic films of the 21st century, Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Érik Canuel, 2006) is an action movie that tells the story of Quebec police officer David Bouchard (Patrick Huard) and his Ontario colleague Martin Ward (Colm Feore) who are forced to work together after a dead body is discovered at the border separating the two provinces.4 First and foremost, Bon Cop, Bad Cop was produced with the objective of reaching a broad Canadian audience and was explicitly marketed as the first Canadian bilingual film. It contains numerous local references, and the murders are directly related to Canada’s national sport, since the victims all worked in the hockey business. The killer is even revealed to be a die-hard hockey fan whose nationalistic impulses led him to kill people who planned to export a hockey team to the United States. Bon Cop, Bad Cop was thus undoubtedly conceived as a commercial film likely to attract large audiences across the country.5 Although it makes extensive use of local references, it also relies on the transnational generic conventions of the cop action film and, more specifically, the buddy film. Very popular in the United States—the Lethal Weapon, Men in Black, and Rush Hour franchises being emblematic examples—the buddy film genre has easily crossed borders and been exploited by other national cinemas such as in France (Taxi, Luc Besson, 1998; Intouchables, Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, 2011) and the UK (Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright, 2007; Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie, 2009). According to Philippa Gates, “all buddy films embrace the same premise: two men of differing personalities and/or backgrounds are thrown together, and their initial lack of understanding of one another is eventually transformed into friendship and mutual respect” (2003, 73–74). This is exactly what happens in Bon Cop, Bad Cop, where the main characters, David and Martin, whom everything initially separates, gradually become friends and learn to accept their differences. Bon Cop, Bad Cop has also been praised for its action scenes. Characterized by spectacular choreography, impressive stunts, and the “intensified continuity” of their editing (Bordwell, 2002), action films borrow from various national cinemas, in terms of their aesthetics and narrative conventions. For instance, one could easily find similarities between Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Hong Kong action films, or with French box office hits like Taxi and Banlieue 13 (Pierre Morel, 2004). That being said, the main inspiration remains Hollywood buddy action films (Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour, etc.), which are more common references

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in Quebec. In addition, it must be mentioned that the Bon Cop, Bad Cop films’ soundtracks mostly comprise of English-language songs (especially the sequel), which also contributes to this association with Hollywood cinema. While appropriating transnational generic conventions, it could therefore be argued that this summer flick mostly aimed to look like a cool action-packed Hollywood film, which can be a profitable strategy since Hollywood cinema is usually perceived as more accessible than local films (Ezra and Rowden, 2006, 3). However, without trying to deny these similarities, it would be overly reductive to conclude that Bon Cop, Bad Cop simply reproduces the codes of Hollywood action films. As Miléna Santoro points out, Quebec genre films “thematiz[e] resistance to the influences that nonetheless shape [their] Hollywood form” (2011, 1239). Bon Cop, Bad Cop clearly distinguishes itself as a Quebec film, first by focusing on the cultural and linguistic differences of the two policemen (which refer to the specificity of Canada as a country with two official languages), and secondly, by clearly affiliating itself with a long and more specific tradition in Quebec cinema, that of the quest for a normative masculine identity. Because of its minority status within Canada and its referendum failures on independence, Quebec has long been perceived as a nation where men are supposedly in deep crisis, unable to form a positive masculine identity and assert themselves. This identity crisis is often transposed into TV series (Boisvert, 2017) and local film productions. As Marshall observes, “Quebec national cinema [… is] preoccupied with masculinity and, moreover, the mapping of its inadequacy onto the national context” (2001, 190). In a similar vein, Yves Laberge has argued that modern Quebec cinema is defined by the “impossibility of creating a Québécois hero” (2012, 159). This central preoccupation with a “masculinity crisis” is still evident in recent Quebec films. We find such a premise in Bon Cop, Bad Cop: at the beginning of the film, David is presented as a man condemned to live alone after his wife left him because of his immaturity and lack of commitment. Echoing this popular trope of the “masculinity crisis,” David is initially portrayed as having little power and control over his life, since his ex-wife (Lucie Laurier) is the one making all the decisions. For instance, when his daughter Gabrielle (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) asks for permission to get her belly button pierced, David jokingly responds: “I’m going to talk to your mom about it and then she’s going to tell me what we decided.”6 The film also portrays David as chaotic with a violent temper. As Martin says to him during an

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Fig. 5.1: Bon Cop, Bad Cop

arrest: “I don’t know if you don’t respect procedures because you’re ignorant, because you’re a lunatic, or just because you’re French.” However, this negative qualification does not last very long, since the story goes on to promote David’s virility and heroic status. For instance, the comparison made in the film between David “the Québécois” and Martin “the polite English Canadian” leads to the valorization of David’s masculinity. Indeed, the opposition between Martin— restrained, well-mannered, “by-the-book”—and David—proactive, violent, anti-authority, a “maverick bad cop from Montreal” (Santoro, 2011, 1239)—clearly benefits David and defines him as the “real man.” Upon his arrival at a crime scene, David is filmed in a low-angle canted shot; the visual composition emphasizes this character’s fussy, raw, crooked, and “masculine” temperament. In some scenes, we also see David smoking, which helps to confirm his image as a manly, rule-breaking guy7 radically different from the Puritan, uptight, and anti-smoking Anglo.8 Not unlike Hollywood models of “muscular masculinity” that have been studied by Susan Jeffords (1994), David’s muscular and scarred physique also attests to his virility and his fighting temperament. The analogy between David and many muscular Hollywood heroes of the 1980s (Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme) is even made explicit when Martin calls him “Rambo on steroids.” Moreover, the fact that Martin mentions that he would like

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to give up field work and get a “desk job,” while David would never consider doing such a thing, emphasizes the Québécois’s more active and heroic masculinity. In a dialogue with the coroner (Louis-José Houde), David even jokingly suggests that Martin is gay, which, beyond the homophobic dimension of such a comment, contributes to discrediting his partner’s masculinity: “I know that, at first glance, he looks like a gay accountant, but don’t let appearances fool you, he’s no accountant.”9 On two occasions, David is also depicted as a man with great sex appeal. In a memorable scene, he has sex with Martin’s younger sister, Iris (Sarain Boylan), who calls him a “hunk” and shouts, “Vive le Québec libre!” when she climaxes. In so doing, the film seems to suggest that the Quebecker’s sexual potency is what finally allows English Canadians to understand a separatist’s point of view! In the film’s ending, David must also rescue his own daughter, who has been kidnapped by the “hockey killer,” which in turn allows him to become the paternal savior. Unsurprisingly, in the film’s sequel, David has won back his wife, and his daughter has begun her training at the Nicolet Police Academy to follow in her father’s footsteps. Such a happy ending, through the representation of a man who emerges from personal crisis, is quite unusual in Quebec cinema. According to Christian Poirier, in many Quebec films, main characters are destined to suffer from a “failure of being” (“empêchement d’être”), whereas Bon Cop, Bad Cop offers the story of an “enchantment of being” (“enchantement d’être”) (2004; 2005, 166).10 Moreover, as Liz Czach observes, Patrick Huard’s screen persona has always been associated with the image of the “common everyman […] an ordinary guy, a middle-class or working-class hero, and not a member of a cultural or class elite” (2016, 138). By resorting to a vision of the ordinary Quebecker, the film provides a popular narrative of male redemption and accomplishment. In addition to referring to the myth of the “masculinity crisis” in Quebec, David’s dysfunctional behavior at the beginning of the film undeniably symbolizes the Quebec nation’s identity misgivings and its need for recognition. In that sense, the film more generally promotes a normative and idealized vision of the Québécois everyman—a utopian narrative through which the nation is admired, and his distinct identity finally acknowledged, within Canada, and even more widely within America. Indeed, in the film’s sequel (Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2, Alain Desrochers, 2017), the two protagonists team up again in order to thwart the terrorist plans of an FBI member who calls himself a “true patriot” and

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plans to blow up several mosques in the United States to “protect” the nation from immigrants.11 Martin is now a senior officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whereas David works as an undercover cop for the Sûreté du Québec. In contrast to the first film, Martin appears much more assertive and impulsive in the sequel, which is explained by his exposure to David, and thus to Quebec’s masculine culture. On a few occasions, Martin even shouts swearwords in French, to the delight of David who congratulates him for his great mastery of a second language. David is also reunited with his wife, who shows a frank admiration for her husband’s work and calls him an “alpha male” (“mâle alpha”). Like the first film, the sequel ends with the consecration of the two male heroes: David and Martin receive the Medal of Honor from the President of the United States. The admiring reaction of their respective families reestablishes them as patriarchs. Certainly, both films also feature a strong cast of women characters, all of whom are portrayed as intelligent, independent, and capable of standing up for themselves. Yet, in a highly significant way, all these women remain confined to secondary roles, as if their strength had to be suppressed to allow men characters to shine and finally be perceived as “heroes.” Such a narrative strategy, far from being exclusive to this film, is also found in De père en flic. De père en flic: The Badge Does Not Necessarily Make the Man De père en flic (Father and Guns, Émile Gaudreault, 2009) is another police comedy that focuses on the conflicted relationship between two men: Jacques (Michel Côté), a fifty-year-old policeman, and his thirtyyear-old son Marc (Louis-José Houde).12 After a police blunder that leads to the kidnapping of an undercover officer by a biker gang, Jacques and Marc are forced to team up to find their colleague. To extract information from the lawyer who defends this criminal group, they sign up for a “parental reconnection therapy,” a father–son group session in the woods that the lawyer is to attend with his son. Even if Jacques and Marc reluctantly take part in the therapy, this experience will prove beneficial for both, as the father learns to verbalize his emotions to his son, and Marc to be more courageous and assertive. Like Bon Cop, Bad Cop, De père en flic is also part of the transnational buddy film genre. The movie explores the great generational differences between two Québécois men: the macho and authoritarian

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“Baby Boomer” vs. the more sensitive but insecure “Gen Xer.” Yet what really stands out in this film is the importance given to the popular discourse of a masculinity “under siege” (Marshall, 2001, 205) or in crisis (Dupuis-Déri, 2012; Boisvert, 2017). It is indeed manifest, from the very first minutes of the film, that despite his many great qualities, Marc suffers from a “lack” of masculinity. Performed by verbose stand-up comedian Louis-José Houde, Marc is brilliant and rational, yet his lack of courage and confidence mean he is not perceived as a “real man.” During his first operation, Marc’s lack of confidence is indeed what leads to the kidnapping of his colleague by the Blood Machines gang. A comic fight ensues between Marc and Jacques, during which the father aggressively criticizes his son’s overzealous attitude, questions his masculinity by calling him a “weather girl” (“Miss Météo”), and enjoins him to “inhabit his balls” (“Habite tes testicules un p’tit peu!”). This narrative focus on Marc’s lack of masculinity is even more evident in another scene with his ex-girlfriend Geneviève (Caroline Dhavernas). Marc does not understand why she left him since she says that he is the “greatest guy in the world.” When he insists on an explanation, Geneviève finally admits that he “lacks meat” (“Tu manques de viande”). Although Marc does not initially understand what his ex-girlfriend means by this, it is clear to the audience that the young woman blames him for lacking manliness and heroism. The film thus takes up the popular theme of Quebec’s “masculinity crisis,” and the concomitant belief that feminist advances have had a negative impact on heterosexual men, more precisely by allowing women to raise “soft” men who develop a flawed, vulnerable identity. While Jacques is also criticized in the film for his conservative values, his macho attitude, his lack of sensitivity, and his sexism, Marc is clearly portrayed as a “wrong”—or at least incomplete—younger model of masculinity; at least initially. In that sense, Marc seems to be influenced by the “other guy” archetype, which has been popularized in many American brom-coms, such as Judd Apatow’s films (The 40-Year-Old Virgin [2005], Funny People [2009], This Is 40 [2012]).13 According to Derrek A. Burrill, the “other guy” is defined by his less-than-macho physique, his acquiescence to female criticism and confusion over the “guy code,” the set of rules and conventions that men must follow in order to “measure up.” […] In essence, part of the pleasure of watching the other guy is to watch him squirm, attempting to navigate the twin minefields of modern female (if not feminist) expectation and contemporary masculine crisis and sequestration. (2014, 14)

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As an archetype, the “other guy”—although represented as more loquacious in its Quebec version—reflects an ambivalence regarding the transformation of the cis-white-male identity in the 21st century. Marc’s lack of confidence and “meat,” as well as the father–son tensions in the film, could thus be said to symbolize the fear of a lack of identity affirmation in Quebec, and more specifically, the inability of the Quebec nation to give rise to men who conform to gender norms and are therefore revered for their masculinity. However, not unlike in Bon Cop, Bad Cop, De père en flic resolves these issues by providing a happy ending for Marc: the young man finally manages to act heroically, arresting the bikers and rescuing his colleague. After shooting some of the gang members without the slightest hesitation, Marc proudly asks his ex-girlfriend, with a satisfied look: “That enough meat for you?” (“C’est-tu assez de viande pour toi, ça?”). The film thus offers a story of male accomplishment through the acquisition of a more assertive and masculine identity. Marc becomes the heroic police officer who finally has “enough meat.” Not surprisingly, the last scene shows Marc and Geneviève leaving the police station together, obviously forming once again a happy couple. This happy ending attests to the influence of the buddy-cop film and the brom-com, since one of these genres’ narrative functions is to allow for the revaluation of heterosexual men within a society perceived as being in great transformation. The popularity of De père en flic led to the production of a sequel in 2017. Taking place about ten years after the events of the first film, the sequel similarly focuses on the tensions between Jacques and his son Marc, whose reconciliation at the end of the first story did not last

Fig. 5.2: De père en flic

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long. Of course, both men have changed during the last decade: Jacques, who is about to retire, has rejuvenated his look by getting tattoos, and has subscribed to dating websites—much to the dismay of his son, who despises his dad’s attempts to act and look younger. Marc, now much more confident, is portrayed as an “action guy”: he fires a shot at a suspect during the very first scene without the slightest hesitation. However, Marc is still obsessed with his work, mostly because of his unconscious desire to please his father. In a plot quite similar to the first film, both men will have to work undercover during a “Bootcamp for Couples” in order to get a confession from one of the participants, Martin Germain (Patrice Robitaille), a Montreal mafia hitman. Jacques thus pretends to be the group’s psychotherapist, while Marc attends the event with his girlfriend Alice (Karine Vanasse). As in the first film, the sequel focuses heavily on the main characters’ flaws, which offer the main comic relief. In particular, the film focuses on Jacques’s backward, sexist, and homophobic behavior. His ofteninappropriate comments to the couples attending the bootcamp are the object of ridicule. His outdated masculine identity, based on stereotypical and heteronormative views of relationships, is clearly portrayed as problematic, and a great source of shame for his son. For example, Jacques awkwardly attempts to help a lesbian couple by trying to determine which partner “plays the man,” and even goes so far as distinguishing them from “normal couples.” Marc frequently criticizes his father’s lack of sensitivity and accuses him of not having an “ounce of psychology.” Although the sequel focuses more extensively on Jacques’s personal issues than the first film, the story still mainly focuses on Marc’s identity issues. Yet, this time, Marc’s flaw is not his lack of courage, but rather his lack of emotional involvement in his couple. He is portrayed as a man completely invested in his work; his intelligent and somewhat “nerdy” temperament allows him to memorize every detail about a potential suspect. As a result, he is not invested in his romantic relationship. On several occasions, Alice accuses Marc of not being there for her. As she tells him: “Even when you are there, you are not there.” At the bootcamp, she also criticizes him for always being cheerful and completely unaware of what is happening in their relationship. Obviously, such a representation of an emotionally distant and work-obsessed man is nothing new, since it is one of the most enduring stereotypes regarding heterosexual men. However, what is interesting in De père en flic 2 is how Marc’s emotional absence is explained. His obsession with work is not represented as a man’s “natural” flaw, but rather the result of

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an unfulfilled desire to be loved and recognized by his father. In other words, Marc’s obsession with work is explained as the symptom of an unconscious desire for his father Jacques to finally be proud of him. The lack of paternal recognition is thus the cause of the son’s identity failure. In that sense, the story takes up a well-known thesis in Quebec, popularized by psychiatrist Guy Corneau (2003), of the absent father and the lost son (“père manquant, fils manqué”): a father’s emotional absence is perceived as leading to a son’s identity crisis, and to his inability to understand who he is “as a man.” Accordingly, in De père en flic 2, only when the father and son reconcile, at the very end of the film, is Marc able to emancipate himself. This comic take on the popular trope of “straight men in crisis” is particularly salient in several scenes. For instance, during an excursion at the bootcamp, the participants are frightened by an approaching bear. After a moment of panic, the women start screaming at the animal, which makes it walk away. Yet, after the bear has left the scene, the women realize that their partners had run away, leaving them completely alone to deal with the situation. This counter-stereotypical scene then leads to heated discussions over dinner concerning the “death of men.” As one of the women says, “In the past, you used to be able to count on your man to be a male. Now, the male, we’re looking for him,” to which her husband retorts: “No, it is you [women] who have destroyed the primitive brute in us. You wanted tender, respectful men, close to their emotions.”14 A few seconds later, Marc intervenes, and also blames women for his lack of maleness: “In bed, it’s the same thing, right? One second she wants you to make wild love to her and break three of her ribs, then two minutes later, you need to recite Baudelaire to her while crying.”15 Through this important dialogue, the film once again draws on the popular vision of a masculinity crisis, which argues that men’s identity issues have been caused by feminist progress, by women’s advancement in society, as well as by their contradictory demands. By doing so, the film capitalizes on the popular tropes of “male inadequacy” and the “sex war,” while offering a happy ending that suggests the possibility of Jacques and Marc finally fulfilling themselves and being recognized as “real” men. Menteur: The Compulsive Liar and His Brother Save Humanity To better understand current trends in popular Quebec cinema, it must be mentioned that three of the four films previously mentioned feature

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Louis-José Houde, a very popular stand-up comedian whose more recent career as a movie star stems from a desire to capitalize on his popularity to make local films profitable. After a notable brief appearance in Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Houde was given the lead role in De père en flic and De père en flic 2. Following the popularity of these two other films, Houde was again cast in the lead role for another summer flick in 2019: Menteur (Compulsive Liar, Émile Gaudreault). This film accounted for 41 percent of box office receipts for Quebec films in 2019, offering “proof of the role that successful films play in overall results” (Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec, 2020, 43; my translation). As the title suggests, Menteur tells the story of a compulsive liar, Simon (Houde), whose habit of never telling the truth eventually has major repercussions: his lies become so numerous that they end up affecting the space-time balance of the world. As a result, Simon and his twin brother Phil (Antoine Bertrand) get trapped in a nightmarish parallel universe in which every lie he ever told has become reality, Phil is the unluckiest man in the world, and a third world war is about to break out. Once again, the film’s premise is that of a man who suffers from a major identity flaw. Simon has alienated all his relatives, some of whom even organize an intervention to remind him that he will always be alone if he does not stop lying: “You don’t have a girlfriend. Your colleagues are freaking out. Your family avoids you.”16 The film makes clear that Simon’s lying habit was caused by a wounded ego. Indeed, towards the end of the film, he realizes that his habit is the product of a deep-seated lack of self-esteem. More specifically, he understands that he started lying at the age of eight, when he was seeking attention from his parents—and especially from his father—who had to focus on taking care of his sick twin brother. Simon’s first lie was therefore the one he told himself: that he was worthless, and that he needed to lie in order to get other people’s attention. With the help of Chloé (Catherine Chabot), a brilliant translator he has a crush on, Simon realizes that to get back to reality, he must ask for forgiveness from his eight-year-old self and convince himself that he is not “worthless,” that he deserves to be loved. Shown in flashback, the scene of Simon’s very first lie reveals a very similar vision of the “male condition” to the one found in De père en flic and De père en flic 2—it is mainly because of a lack of attention and a desire to please the absent father that Simon developed this major identity flaw. It is thus by reconciling himself with the child he once was, and by working on his relationship with his twin brother, that Simon will finally emancipate himself, become an honest man, … and find love.

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Quebec’s Buddy Films and Their Ambivalent Relationship with Hollywood Quebec popular cinema undeniably draws on popular transnational film genres in order to appeal to broad audiences. More specifically, the five films discussed above all resort to narrative conventions associated with the buddy film by focusing on “two men of differing personalities and/or backgrounds [who] are thrown together” (Gates, 2003, 73). Even the movie Menteur, in which the main characters are twin brothers, emphasizes the men’s diametrically opposed personalities as well as their contrasting physiques (Phil is tall and a little overweight, while Simon is short and slim). In every one of these films, the main characters are men with clashing personalities, which sets up comic altercations and allows these films to promote a happy resolution through men’s self-fulfillment and solidarity. It is important to reiterate that all these films are comedies. The production of commercial comedies is a popular transnational strategy to counter Hollywood’s hegemony. In his study of French blockbusters, Charlie Michael shows how France massively turned to the production of “localized comedy blockbusters” (2019, 179) to ensure the profitability of its national cinema in the 21st century. Since humor is usually perceived as culturally specific, people are more likely to see local films if they are comedies: “For risk-averse executives, the popularity of comedies tends to constitute a primary example of how French cinema can best defend itself from Hollywood while maintaining a form of cultural specificity” (Michael, 2019, 183). We can therefore easily draw a parallel with Quebec popular cinema, which seems to prioritize a similar strategy through its production of comedy summer flicks.17 As I also pointed out, these films draw, to varying degrees, on the Hollywood trend of the brom-com by focusing on “ordinary” men who are desperately trying to find fulfillment in a society in which gender roles have undergone profound change. Just as in Hollywood brom-coms, Quebec summer flicks represent complicated men who try to redefine themselves in a postfeminist society, while paradoxically revalorizing men’s hegemony through the narrative marginalization of women. Indeed, as Burrill aptly remarks, while films portraying “other guys” try to distance themselves from traditional and stereotyped models of masculinity, they nevertheless “serv[e] as a protocol that excludes female participation” (2014, 14). In that sense, Quebec summer flicks must be perceived as narratives of accomplishment that retain a certain ambivalence towards gender roles. All five films indeed feature

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strong, intelligent, and assertive women characters: David’s spouse in Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 is portrayed as a strong and responsible woman; MC (Mariana Mazza), the computer whiz in Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 is, according to Martin, the best in the country; Marc’s girlfriends Geneviève and Alice are competent police officers (De père en flic and De père en flic 2); Chloé, the translator with whom Simon falls in love in Menteur, is resilient and a brilliant polyglot. However, with the sole exception of Alice, who is a little more central to the story of De père en flic 2, these women characters only have small roles and make rare screen appearances. Moreover, they have no role to play in the films’ resolution: they clearly delegate heroic acts to men. In line with Bill Marshall’s argument, Quebec comedy films thus testify to a certain ambivalence, oscillating between a desire to identify with the “vast spaces and possibilities of américanité” and, on the contrary, to retract to a form of “defensive territorialization” (2001, 173). By integrating “elements of ambivalence, resistance” (Santoro, 2011, 1233), these films try to localize narratives and to negotiate a new vision of the Québécois everyman (Marshall, 1993; Boisvert, 2020). My analysis thus highlights the importance of local references, as well as of language as an element of cultural differentiation and identification, while showing how these summer flicks try to provide quick resolutions to the myth of the Quebec “masculinity under siege” (Marshall, 2001, 205). In so doing, these films continue a trend identified by Marshall, namely that of “the comedy of gender identity and (hetero)sexual relations” (190). That being said, Quebec’s lingering concern with a supposed “masculine condition” is certainly not the only reason why men occupy lead roles in summer flicks, and why these films focus on men’s quest for heroism. Indeed it must be mentioned that the Quebec film industry remains dominated by men, particularly in technical positions, as well as the most important one, directing (Gobert and Lanlo, 2017). Moreover, as Lupien et al. show (2019), male directors still benefit from bigger budgets than women, which helps boost the promotion and popularity of their films. Men are systematically put in charge of the films with the biggest budgets: in 2019, the four Quebec films with a budget over $5 million were directed by men (Lupien et al., 2021, 11). This impacts film content since male directors tend to cast men: male characters represent 61 percent of speaking roles in movies directed by men, whereas female directors distribute speaking roles in almost perfectly equal proportion (Lupien et al., 2021, 26). The androcentrism

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of summer comedies is also explained by this inequality within the Quebec film industry, and more specifically male directors’ propensity to stage characters “with whom they share a gendered experience” (Lupien et al., 2021, 67; my translation). Summer flicks produced since 2010 also tend to include moments of dialogue that explicitly address the issue of sexual and/or gender diversity,18 thus testifying to scriptwriters’ awareness of the topicality of these themes. For instance, Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 addresses gender diversity and intersexuality through the character of MC, who admits to having a higher-than-average testosterone level. She laments to David and Martin: “This morning, my endocrinologist told me I wasn’t the right sex! Yeah my testosterone level is abnormally high: women are at 2, men are at 7, and I’m a fucking 9.2!” De père en flic 2 also focuses on sexual diversity by including a lesbian couple. Moreover, it is revealed that Martin, the criminal whom Jacques and Marc want to recruit as an informer, likes to dress as a woman. Martin’s cross-dressing habit destabilizes the straight male stereotype with which he is associated and subverts gender norms. Finally, the film Menteur concludes with Phil’s wife confessing to having an affair with a female colleague. It is therefore clear that the theme of sexual and gender diversity has been perceived as an important topic to address in Quebec popular films produced since 2010. Yet the symbolic charge of most dialogues is quickly defused by the slapstick humor of the scenes. The topic of diversity seems to be instrumentalized without any real desire to change discourses or social norms. Finally, it should be noted that unlike American buddy films, which usually center around a group of friends, Quebec comedy films tend to focus more specifically on men united by a form of kinship (familial or national): David and Martin are both Canadian citizens, even though the film relies on their initial antagonism; De père en flic focuses on the “generational duo” of Jacques and his son Marc; and in Menteur, the fate of humanity depends on the ability of twin brothers to work together. It could thus be argued that focusing on forms of kinship allows Quebec films to emphatically reflect on the theme of masculine filiation as a possible resolution to the nation’s identity issues. Again, this could testify to the importance of the theme of precarious identity in Quebec cinema, as opposed to Hollywood cinema, which relies on a more confident vision of its own cultural identity.

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When Comedians Come to the Rescue of Quebec Masculinity Even though Quebec buddy films rely on transnational generic conventions and have been associated with box office hits like the Lethal Weapon franchise (Santoro, 2001, 1239; Aird and Robert, 2016), it would be presumptuous to conclude that they were made with the explicit objective of targeting international audiences. As I have shown, these films undeniably rely on local cultural references. Furthermore, they all feature a popular stand-up comedian in one of the lead roles, which is intended to boost their popularity in the domestic market. Some comedians have also been hired for secondary roles (Louis-José Houde in Bon Cop, Bad Cop; Mariana Mazza in Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2; Mariana Mazza and Mehdi Bousaidan in De père en flic 2, Marie-Lise Pilote and Marie-Lyne Joncas in Menteur). As numerous studies point out, Quebec is known for having developed a very strong local star system, unlike the rest of Canada (Byers, 2012; Czach, 2012; Lee and York, 2016). Quebec’s star system works “centrifically” (Straw, 2010, 33), which means that it is very strong locally yet almost unknown outside the province. In such a small market, artists are frequently required to take on multiple roles and become involved in different media. This is particularly true for stand-up comedians, who enjoy an unprecedented level of popularity and visibility in the province. According to Andy Nulman, who directed the Just for Laughs Festival from 1985 to 1999, “There aren’t many places where the [status] of comedy is so strong in proportion to the population […] In Quebec, it’s a big business” (quoted in Nadeau, 2020). Many people in the Quebec cultural industry have indeed argued that comedians enjoy an unparalleled level of visibility, as they are frequently invited to appear on television shows, or even asked—as the five films analyzed here illustrate—to take on roles as actors for which their background did not prepare them. As comedian Virginie Fortin has said, “There is a very strong star system in Quebec, which creates a kind of microclimate that makes humor take up a lot of space—maybe even too much” (quoted in Nadeau, 2020).19 Since humor remains more culturally specific and less exportable than other forms of cultural production, lead actors in Quebec summer flicks are well known in the province but almost unknown internationally. For that reason, Quebec’s most recent “buddy films” do not seem to rely on generic transnational conventions to ensure their exportability— although that always remains a possibility—but rather take advantage of the popularity of American genre films to ensure their profitability

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domestically.20 We might even argue that by attributing some of the main roles to local comedians, these films rely on the popular trope of the “Québécois in crisis” in order to provide a happy resolution to this pervasive discourse. Indeed, even though these films initially capitalize on a vision of men in crisis, or at least inadequate, they end up emphasizing these characters’ heroic status. The central function of these films is thus not to devalue men, but to rehabilitate them. In that sense, it is quite telling that main roles have been given to comedians, since the comedy industry is the most profitable cultural sector in Quebec. Moreover, the comedians who play leading roles in our corpus, Patrick Huard and Louis-José Houde, are among the most popular and successful in the province.21 The enviable socio-economic status of these stand-up comedians therefore allows these films to promote positive models of male accomplishment.22 By providing happy endings, these summer flicks also go against major trends in Quebec cinema, which tends to prioritize ambivalent or dramatic conclusions (Dyer, 2020; Ransom, 2020).23 Robert Aird and Marc-André Robert have similarly noticed that Quebec comedy films tend to explicitly oppose the recurring figure of the “male loser” found in numerous local dramas: “This distinction in Quebec comedy compared to local dramas may also partly explain its popular success” (2016, 268).24 The adoption of transnational cinematographic trends, and especially of successful Hollywood genres, could thus be perceived as a strategy of reappropriation of popular discourses to preserve Quebec national cinema, and its (male) star system—with all the issues that obviously implies concerning the reproduction of gender norms and, most notably, the marginalization of women. Conclusion The main goal of this chapter was to understand the predominant characteristics of Quebec popular cinema in the 21st century by focusing on some of its greatest successes (Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2, De père en flic and De père en flic 2, Menteur) and evaluating the influence of genre films on their narrative construction. Incidentally, the analysis highlighted the gendered inflection of these films, where men occupy central roles, which means that their popularity could in part be explained by the stereotypes they promote regarding masculinity. Quite tellingly, in June 2023, Bell Media even announced that Bon Cop,

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Bad Cop would become a TV series (Bertrand, 2023), which shows the enduring appeal of the franchise. The Quebec film industry therefore relies on male narratives and a male star system to ensure its profitability in the 21st century—an issue that we need to address more extensively (on this subject, see Boisvert, 2020). Yet mobilizations that have called for greater diversity in Quebec cinema, as well as the parity goals of funding agencies that were put in place in 2016, have also led to significant changes. For instance, even though 2019 was the year during which Menteur was in theaters, it was also a particularly prolific year for women directors: Louise Archambault’s poetic adaptation of the novel Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) was the second most successful domestic film of the year, while her comedy Merci pour tout (Thanks for Everything) was the fourth most profitable; Monia Chokri’s first feature film, La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love), met with unexpected success, both in theaters and at festivals; Sophie Deraspe’s Antigone won the award for Best Canadian Film at the Toronto Film Festival; Kuessipan (Myriam Verreault) was also praised by critics; and Anne Émond’s Jeune Juliette, whose comic yet touching story of a teenage girl’s discovery of love and sexuality, was another success at the domestic box office. These films, all directed by women, also featured mainly female characters, perhaps in a desire to change the codes of popular Quebec cinema. It remains to be seen what trends domestic films will prioritize in the upcoming years, but we can hope that Quebec popular cinema will continue to diversify, and thus to finally acknowledge that having a sense of humor is not the prerogative of straight white men. Works Cited Académie de la transformation numérique (ATN). NETendances 2022— Portrait numérique des foyers québécois 13.5 (2022). https:// transformation-numerique.ulaval.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ netendances-2022-portrait-numerique-des-foyers-quebecois.pdf. Aird, Robert and Marc-André Robert. L’imaginaire comique dans le cinéma québécois 1952–2014. Quebec City: Septentrion, 2016. Bertrand, Caroline. “‘Bon cop, bad cop’ devient une série.” Métro (12 June 2023). https://journalmetro.com/culture/ecrans/3097989/boncop-bad-cop-devient-une-serie/.

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Boisvert, Stéfany. “Les hommes du box-office québécois: la construction sérielle du genre dans les sequels Nitro Rush et Les 3 p’tits cochons 2.” Nouvelles Études Francophones 35.1 (2020): 101–116. ——. “Le trouble silencieux des hommes en série. La ‘masculinité en crise’ dans les séries télévisées dramatiques nord-américaines centrées sur des personnages masculins.” Genre en séries 5 (2017): 213–246. Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16–28. Burrill, Derek A. The Other Guy: Media Masculinity within the Margins. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Byers, Michele. “On the (Im)possibility of Canadian Celebrity.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 12.4 (2012). http://reconstruction. eserver.org/Issues/121/byers_michele.shtml. Corneau, Guy. Père manquant, fils manqué: que sont les hommes devenus? Montréal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2003. Czach, Liz. “Bon Cop, Bad Cop: A Tale of Two Star Systems.” Celebrity Cultures in Canada. Eds. Katja Lee and Lorraine York. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. 131–146. ——. “Television, Film, and the Canadian Star System.” Canadian Television: Text and Context. Eds. Marian Bredin, Scott Henderson, and Sarah A. Matheson. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. 61–72. Demers, Maxime. “Les héros du box-office québécois.” Le Journal de Québec (30 September 2017): 19. Dupuis-Déri, Francis. “Le discours de la ‘crise de la masculinité’ comme refus de l’égalité entre les sexes: Histoire d’une rhétorique antiféministe.” Recherches féministes 25.1 (2012): 89–109. Dyer, Kester. “Landscape, Trauma, and Identity: Simon Lavoie’s Le Torrent.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020: 15–38. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Gates, Philippa. “Buddy Films.” American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. Ed. Bret E. Carroll. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003. 73–75. Gobert, Céline and Jean-Marie Lanlo. Le cinéma québécois au féminin. Montreal: L’instant même, 2017. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” Cultural Resistance Reader. Ed. Stephen Duncombe. London and New York: Verso, 2002. 185–192. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

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Laberge, Yves. “Social Representations of Men and Local Heroes in Québec’s Public Sphere and Culture: Another Case of a ‘Distinct Society’?” Canadian Perspectives on Men & Masculinities: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Ed. Jason A. Laker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 151–162. Lee, Katja and Lorraine York, eds. Celebrity Cultures in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. Loiselle, André. “Subtly Subversive or Simply Stupid: Notes on Quebec Popular Cinema.” Post Script 18.2 (1998): 75–84. Lupien, Anna, Anouk Bélanger, and Francine Descarries. Qui filme qui? Vers des représentations équilibrées devant et derrière la caméra. Montreal: Réalisatrices Équitables/Réseau québécois en études féministes/Service aux collectivités de l’UQAM, 2021. Marshall, Bill. “Gender, Narrative and National Identity in Les Filles de Caleb.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2.2–3 (1993): 51–65. ——. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Michael, Charlie. French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Nadeau, Jean-Benoît. “L’humour, c’est du sérieux!” McGill News (January 2020). https://mcgillnews.mcgill.ca/s/1762/news/interior.aspx?sid=1762&gid= 2&pgid=2156. Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec. Statistiques sur l’industrie du film et de la production télévisuelle indépendante. L’exploitation cinématographique. Quebec City: Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2020. Poirier, Christian. Le cinéma québécois: à la recherche d’une identité? Tome 1: l’imaginaire filmique. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2004. ——. “Le ‘renouveau’ du cinéma québécois.” Cités 3.23 (2005): 165–182. Ransom, Amy J. “Men in Pain: Home, Nostalgia, and Masculinity in 21st Century Quebec Film.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 125–146. Santoro, Miléna. “Policing Genre Films, or, How American Are Quebec ‘Polars’?” The French Review 84.6 (2011): 1232–1244. Straw, Will. “Cross-Border Visualities and the Canadian Image.” Imaginations 1.1 (2010): 24–39. Tinkcom, Matthew, and Amy Villarejo. Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Tremblay, Odile. “2016, difficile année pour le cinéma québécois.” Le Devoir (11 January 2017). www.ledevoir.com/culture/cinema/488867/chute-desparts-du-cinema-quebecois-en-2016.

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——. “Comme une petite honte ….” Le Devoir (12 August 2006). https://www. ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/115781/comme-une-petite-honte. Véronneau, Pierre (2006). “Genres and Variations: The Audiences of Quebec Cinema.” Self-Portraits. Eds. André Loiselle and Tom McSorley. Ottawa: The Canadian Film Institute/Institut canadien du film, 2006. 93–127.

Notes 1. Netflix has commissioned one Quebec film, Jusqu’au déclin (The Decline, Patrice Laliberté, 2020). However, considering Netflix’s massive investments in content production in Canada since 2016, it is clear that the production of original Quebec content (exclusive to the platform) is not—yet?—a priority. 2. Popular cinema is broadly defined as films that attempt “at reaching a mass rather than merely cinephile audience” (Marshall, 2001, 172) or, as Liz Czach puts it, films that are “unapologetically commercial” (2016, 132). 3. By defining popular cinema, in line with Loiselle (1998, 2019) and Marshall (2001), as “successful movies” (Loiselle, 1998, 75) that generate the biggest box office revenues, my goal is to challenge any definition of popular culture that pits the people “against the power-bloc” (Hall, 2002, 192), which means that “popular cinema” would have to be defined as radically opposed to the aesthetic and ideological orientations of the mainstream movie industry. Such a definition does not mean that we must refrain from criticizing popular films. In line with more recent work in cultural studies, the objective is only to abandon legitimist approaches to film studies, thus taking popular films seriously, and acknowledge audiences’ agency. 4. Bon Cop, Bad Cop was the second most profitable Quebec film produced in the period 1985–2019, with a total theater attendance of 1,320,394 people, and total revenues of $8,973,867. Only Séraphin: un homme et son péché (Séraphin: Heart of Stone, Charles Binamé, 2002) did better in the same period. The four other films discussed in this chapter (Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2, De père en flic, De père en flic 2, and Menteur) also made the top twenty list of the most profitable Quebec films. To give a quick comparison, Xavier Dolan’s art-house film Mommy, which was the most successful Quebec film in 2014, sold 363,561 tickets, thus earning $2,707,444 domestically. Quebec summer flicks often manage to earn three to four times the revenue of other local films. For example, in 2019, Menteur was seen in theaters by nearly three times as many people as the second highest-grossing local film, Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down, Louise Archambault, 2019) (Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec, 2020). 5. Although Bon Cop, Bad Cop has been promoted as the first truly bilingual Canadian film, it is important to note, as Czach has (2016), that it was primarily popular in Quebec, since it mostly mobilized its local star system (Patrick Huard, Louis-José Houde, Lucie Laurier, Pierre Lebeau).

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6. Original: “Je vais en parler avec ta mère puis elle va me dire ce qu’on a décidé.” All translations are my own. 7. Smoking has long been associated with hegemonic masculinity: a powerful, virile, rule-breaking, and independent man who is unconcerned about his health (any form of care being defined as feminine). This association between hegemonic masculinity and cigarettes was greatly popularized by the Marlboro company and its iconic figure, the Marlboro Man, and even made explicit in one of the company’s slogans: “Where there’s a Man … there’s a Marlboro.” 8. Obviously, the fact that David’s masculinity is more valued in the film than Martin’s does not mean that the character is, overall, more positively represented than his partner. For instance, film critic Odile Tremblay, who obviously did not appreciate the film, saw David as exemplifying many prejudices about Quebeckers: “Despite its intentions of cultural rapprochement, Canuel’s film adds to these reductive clichés. It is the Quebecker who is the worst of the two companions in this beautiful family portrait. The policeman played by Huard may not be the uptight one, but he is a real bully without ethics. The Ontario cop is a classy guy and Colm Feore does not disgrace his little Anglo persona” (2006). 9. Original: “Je sais qu’à première vue, il a l’air d’un comptable homosexuel, mais fie-toi pas aux apparences, yé pas comptable.” 10. Poirier defines the narrative of an “empêchement d’être” [failure to be] as a story defined by “lack and emptiness, a tragic narrative where the essence of identity is sought through a closure to the open question posed by identity.” In contrast, the “enchantment of being” (“enchantement d’être”) refers to films that offer a “narrative of achievement and ambivalence positively assumed and allowing the articulation of a diversified figure of identity integrating multiple references as well as a more positive representation of the past” (2005, 166, my translation). 11. Although the sequel did not earn as much as the first film, it still ranked as the second most popular domestic film in 2017 (602,530 tickets sold; $4,701,000 at the box office). Incidentally, the number one Quebec film in 2017 was De père en flic 2, which is discussed in the next section (Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec, 2020, 52). 12. De père en flic is the third most popular Quebec film since 1985. It has been seen in theaters by 1,242,378 people, generating revenues of $8,814,367. Also very popular, the 2017 sequel attracted 683,360 people to theaters ($5,233,678) (Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec, 2020, 52). 13. Brom-coms (bromantic comedies) are films that focus primarily on male friendships. Usually in their thirties or forties, the main characters often experience relationship problems and are portrayed as immature. 14. Original: “Avant, on pouvait compter sur son homme pour être un mâle. Maintenant, le mâle, on le cherche.” “Non, c’est vous qui avez détruit la brute primitive en nous. Vous avez voulu des hommes tendres, respectueux, proches de leurs émotions ….”

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15. Original: “Au lit, c’est la même chose, hein. Une seconde, elle veut que tu la prennes sauvagement pis que tu lui casses trois côtes, pis deux minutes après, il faut que tu lui récites du Baudelaire en pleurant.” 16. Original: “T’as pas de blonde. Tes collègues capotent. Ta famille t’évite.” 17. However, while according to Michael (2019, ch. 6), French comedies tend to focus on issues of class and/or ethno-cultural differences (Intouchables, Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au bon Dieu), Quebec comedies focus more on issues of sex and gender. 18. I made a similar observation in a previous article, in which I focused on four popular Quebec films: Les 3 p’tits cochons (The Three Little Pigs, Patrick Huard, 2007), Les 3 p’tits cochons 2 (The Three Little Pigs 2, Jean-François Pouliot, 2016), Nitro (Alain Desrochers, 2007), and Nitro Rush (Alain Desrochers, 2016) (Boisvert, 2020). 19. Original: “Il s’est érigé un vedettariat très fort au Québec, ce qui crée une sorte de microclimat qui fait que l’humour prend beaucoup de place—peut-être même trop” (quoted in Nadeau, 2020). 20. Incidentally, Netflix recently purchased the Internet distribution rights for these four films, thus indicating that the platform sees some potential in them. The domestic commercial success of these films as well as their recuperation of transnational generic conventions could indeed make them very appealing for a platform targeting a global market. 21. Another of Quebec’s most popular comedians is Martin Matte. Although Matte doesn’t appear in the films analyzed here, he was one of the lead actors in Le Trip à trois (Nicolas Monette, 2017), one of the most popular films of 2017–2018. 22. Recently, a musical sketch presented at the 2013 Olivier Gala (the annual ceremony that honors achievements in the comedy sector) created a small controversy. Performed by Virginie Fortin and Arnaud Soly, two local comedians in their thirties, the sketch “Humour used to be better” (L’humour, c’était mieux avant) mocked the masculinist and sexist practices of an older generation of Quebec male comedians, as well as the hegemony of men in this artistic sector. While many applauded the sketch and its call for inclusion, others criticized its ageist and even “woke” tone. This event alone testifies to the hegemony of men within the comedy star system—in Quebec as in many other national contexts—and the debates that take place on that subject. 23. Ransom has also noted that in Quebec cinema, “Only comedy in the melodramatic mode tends toward a ‘happy ending’” (2020, 138). 24. Original: “Cette distinction dans la comédie québécoise par rapport aux drames explique peut-être aussi en partie son succès populaire.”

chapter six

Genre Cinema and Colonialism First Nations Meet Zombies Bill Marshall Genre Cinema and Colonialism

In the past two decades, the horror subgenre of the zombie or “zombie apocalypse” movie has experienced unprecedented proliferation and success. Well over half of the at least 600 zombie movies made since 1920 have been created since the turn of the millennium, a number not restricted to Hollywood but representing a truly international, global production.1 As well as the Anglo-American fare too familiar to enumerate, we may cite the following examples out of (very) many national cinemas: France (La horde/The Horde, Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher, 2009; La nuit a dévoré le monde/The Night Eats the World, Dominique Rocher, 2018; Italy (In un giorno la fine/The End? L’inferno fuori, Daniele Misischia, 2017); South Korea (Train to Busan, Yeon Sang-ho, 2016), and, in what is now a well-established comic and self-referential mode, from India, Zombie Reddy (Prasanth Varma, 2021). This proliferation has been accompanied, and equaled, by an outpouring of interpretations and readings, and of academic attention. As Sarah Juliet Lauro puts it in her introduction to the edited volume Zombie Theory: A Reader: Looking at the surge in zombie cinema and its increasing diversity, many felt the zombie resonated with the occurrences that defined the era: the global economic downturn; the advent of new, anesthetizing pocket technology; the increased sense of terror attacks in the wake of 9/11; the perpetuation of a state of constant warfare; the looming sense of ecological disaster; a shift in demographics toward an overall aging population. (2017, 5)

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What she terms the zombie’s “semiotic fecundity,” and John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic call “a shifting signifier with an unending hermeneutical compass” (2017, 5), clearly poses challenges for any examination of the two Quebec film texts to be discussed here, Les affamés (Ravenous, Robin Aubert, 2017) and Blood Quantum (Jeffrey Barnaby, 2019). Civilizational issues, capitalism and colonialism, specific, even punctual, historical events and indeed traumas, as well as national narratives, jostle for attention, as we shall see, in that discussion. Before looking at the Quebec specificity, it is therefore worth pausing to consider the mechanisms and historical conditions of what I am tempted to call, in this case and in a contradistinctive quip to what follows, the inflamed “allegoritis” surrounding the zombie movie. Here I draw on Fredric Jameson’s recent work Allegory and Ideology, a key term within which is “allegoresis,” “the reading of a text as though it were an allegory” (2019, 25). In his sweeping discussion of allegory as historical form, Jameson makes clear that it is bound up with crisis: allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgement, they are unable to find in the schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. (2019, 34)

It is not outlandish to claim that “ominous shifts” and “what lies beneath” are suggestive for anyone seeking to look at the horror genre, rhyming with a denaturalization of the “normal” and normative whose many potential forms do not exclude the apocalyptic: “allegory […] reemerges as allegoresis in the dispersal of that [bourgeois] culture and the relativization of its facts and its literal levels, its national and linguistic references, and the multiplicity of its historical situations and populations” (Jameson, 2019, 26; emphasis added). Ever attentive to the polysemy of the literary or cultural text, Jameson is at pains to emphasize the way that “genuine allegory does not seek the ‘meaning’ of a work, but rather functions to reveal its structure of multiple meanings” (2019, 10), an argument reminiscent of his comments on the symbolism of the shark in Jaws, in his influential 1979 essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.”2 The first Quebec specificity to deal with, however, is that of production. Given the proliferation of the zombie movie in global cinema(s) as noted above, where to place Les affamés and Blood Quantum in the history

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of genre filmmaking in Quebec, and in particular that of horror? (Here we take film “genre” to designate a process of categorization that plays with audience expectations through repetition—a familiar offering—and difference—a new film—and “horror” a construction of film conventions, meanings, and techniques aimed to shock, unsettle, and induce fear and dread.) Needless to say, we are looking at an interface of world and local/national tendencies, an interface intensified by expanding Quebec film production—and relative box office success and critical recognition—since 2000, along with its greater insertion into global film circuits.3 Before then, Quebec cinema had, since its largely auteurist beginnings in the 1960s,4 seen comedy emerge as its main popular genre, and these films still dominate box office listings in the 21st century, along with the hybrid policier variants, Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Erik Canuel, 2006) and its sequel (Alain Desrochers, 2017), and costume melodramas or “heritage films” emerging from well-established source texts, such as Séraphin: un homme et son péché (Séraphin: Heart of Stone, Charles Binamé, 2002). The only attempt at a Quebec horror film had been Jean Beaudin’s Le diable est parmi nous (The Possession of Virginia) in 1972, but this was joined by Sur le seuil (Evil Words, Éric Tessier, 2003) and at least ten others before the recent anglophone productions, Blood Quantum and Slaxx (Elza Kephart, 2020). In a comprehensive examination of the topic, Gina Freitag and André Loiselle argue firstly from these production contexts in order to explain the phenomenon: increased pressure from federal and provincial funding agencies for films to be lucrative and indeed profitable, and the consequent diversification of Quebec film culture of which “horror has been the most flagrant spawn” (Freitag and Loiselle, 2013, 193). To anticipate a term I shall use presently, the authors posit the textual “uncanny” inherent in viewing the horror genre as linked to contextual modes of production including adaptation (Tessier’s use of the novelist Patrick Sénécal, along with Daniel Grou for Les sept jours du talion/7 Days, 2010), and, slightly more convincingly, the spread of coproductions. French director Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), for example, is set in France but shot entirely in Quebec with a Québécois cast apart from the two young female leads. Indeed, about ten minutes into the film, audiences see Xavier Dolan and the rest of his fictional family splattered across their kitchen. What is also clear, however, is that the expansion of Quebec genre—including horror—cinema echoes diversifications and restructurings to be found in other film industries. The “New French Horror” that emerged after 2000 was also dependent on new niches of funding and distribution available

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to budding film entrepreneurs for making low-budget, and exportable, horror movies. The first, the successful stalk-and-slash Promenons-nous dans les bois (Deep in the Woods, Lionel Delplanque, 2000), led to the creation of the production house Bee Movies: “Bee” for “B” movies on the American model, including several later horror productions. Blumhouse Productions, within but initially on the periphery of the Hollywood system, best known for its horror output such as Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) and now an important industry player, was founded in 2000 on the same low-budget model. The production details of Les affamés already offer clues to the nature of the beast. Robin Aubert, the director and screenwriter whose fifth feature it is, was born in 1972 in Ham-Nord, in which area the film is set. Technically in the “Centre du Québec” region but near Estrie, agricultural and forested but in proximity to (former) mining settlements, the region is also the setting of his first feature, the horror movie Saints-Martyrs-desDamnés (a twist on the name of the actual town, Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens) (2005). His fourth film as director, Tuktuq (2016), is a docufiction in which he plays a journalist visiting the Arctic territory of Nunavik in Quebec who comes to understand the threats there to the Indigenous population. Aubert is also an established actor, moving between popular television and film, as is frequent in Quebec (a relatively minor role in the huge box office hit De père en flic/Fathers and Guns, Emile Gaudreault, 2009; Les maîtres du suspense/The Masters of Suspense, Stéphane Lapointe, 2014) and in art cinema (La comtesse de Baton Rouge/The Countess of Baton Rouge, André Forcier, 1998; the anti-racist Le nèg’/The Negro, Robert Morin, 2002). The production company for Les affamés was La Maison de Prod, founded in 2010 by Stéphanie Morissette and Ève Marchand, which has made films with art-house directors (and festival favorites) Denis Côté and Robert Morin. While Canadian distribution was in the hands of the well-established Montreal company Les Films de Séville (whose predecessor MaloFilm had existed there since 1983; it is now owned by the multinational based in Toronto, Entertainment One), the film successfully achieved an international distribution deal with Netflix. Horror genre, “home,” minorities, art-house, the global: how do these feed into Les affamés, and wherefore allegorical readings of zombies? In the film, the zombies are infected, and infect others, through bites. They are of the fast, enraged, frantic, and insatiable kind, and when not attacking people and invading new territory they build, and gaze at, mysterious towers of discarded household objects. No explanation is given as to the origin of the outbreak, and state and governmental figures are conspicuous

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Fig. 6.1: Les affamés

by their absence. It is a tale, then, of isolated, local survivors who then band together in a mini-journey narrative towards some safer haven. The narrative centers first on Bonin (Marc-André Grondin) and Vézina (Didier Lucien), who patrol the Quebec countryside in their pick-up truck, hunting zombies. Vézina is killed by them early in the narrative, and Bonin in his subsequent encounters with humans gravitates towards forming the group with Tania (Monia Chokri), who may or may not be already infected as she sports a bite mark; Céline (Brigitte Poupart); Pauline (Micheline Lanctôt) and Thérèse (Marie-Ginette Guay), an older same-sex couple and, it seems, Vézina’s adoptive parents; and a little girl, Zoé (Charlotte St-Martin). All except the latter are killed or zombified; Zoé escapes the area with a passing racing car driver glimpsed at the outset of the film. A post-credit shot has Bonin and Tania, like the other zombies, standing and staring at a tower of objects. In a review of the film in The Globe and Mail, Robert Everett-Green yields to temptation. Hedging bets as he writes, “Aubert’s film is not a blatant sociopolitical allegory, although he leaves plenty of room for allegorical interpretation”; nonetheless: Imagine the Quebec homeland being overrun by a hegemonic tribe with its own culture, and its own irresistible method of converting the inhabitants into beings such as themselves. That is the worst Québécois nightmare, from the Conquest of 1759 to the arrival of niqabs on the streets of Montreal. The latest official expression of that fear is Bill 62, passed by the Quebec National Assembly on Oct. 18, which requires everyone to uncover their faces when receiving or giving government services. (Everett-Green, 2017)

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I do not wish to set up this reviewer as a straw man against which I then muster dismissive counter-arguments. To be fair, he recognizes the “nuances” of the film, and we shall see presently that the polysemy of the text undoubtedly includes readings which pertain, for Quebec audiences, to national preoccupations. However, his argument demonstrates the need for a careful use of allegory and an awareness of its operations. Here I shall adapt Fredric Jameson’s four interpenetrating categories (2019, 12 ff.), which are useful if we are to perform an “allegoresis” on Les affamés: • The literal text (what happens in the narrative, the textual objects, including what the cinema spectator sees, the fact of zombies); • The interpretive codes deployed to seek out, or speculate upon, secret or hidden meanings of the text beyond the literal; • The consequences for individual experience, in existential, subjective, and psychoanalytic terms; • The consequences for collective experience or history. Distinguishing these categories or levels has several advantages. The literal text would also force attention to what is specific to this film in terms of the representation of zombies, and of cinematic form: what kind of zombie film is this, and what kind of zombies? Interpretive codes can pile in, including asking what the accordion, the gherkin, and parrot ‘mean’ (as we shall discuss). The emphasis on individual experience, including desire, speaks to that important dimension of horror genre criticism which has focused on the unconscious and repression, but which here, I shall argue, is also about grief, mourning, and personal loss. And the collective dimension places us in the realm of ideology, in which a (necessarily) imaginary relationship to the real and the reproduction of naturalized social norms involves the mobilizing of identity constructs such as “humanity” and, depending on the film’s audiences, national (English-Canadian, as, for example, in the Globe and Mail review quoted from above, but also Québécois, including the potential differences within those categories). It is beyond doubt that Les affamés mobilizes certain Quebec identifications, via certain modes of recognition. The general “dehumanizing” fate of the infected implies the emptying out of minds often seen in zombie criticism as characteristic of capitalist commodity culture (an idea associated with discussion of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead

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(1978), largely set in a shopping mall), and the film emphasizes visually the detritus of that civilization, not least in the towers of objects that are built. As George MacLeod points out, however, these objects are not “the shiny trinkets of consumerist suburban North America, but easily recognizable items of rural decline,” and he bases much of his analysis of the film as a commentary on rural poverty, indeed seeing the film as an “allegory” of that (2021, 111, 106). At the same time, a generalized “Quebec” is asserted thematically and visually. The intrepid group of Québécois survivors fighting the Other against the odds, and seeking to preserve remnants of their culture as Tania trails around the accordion, is at least partially coded as diverse and inclusive in terms of age, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity (although the one black character, Vézina, is killed early on). They are local to the area, not displaced city dwellers encountering rural horror, but in one dialogue a nod is given to the neglect of the countryside by politicians. Connotations of minoritization, and even disappearance and erasure, that have haunted Quebec historiography and memory are built into the drama. Marc-André Grondin is associated for Quebec audiences with his most famous role of Zac in C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005), which allegorized him as representing Quebec modernity, born with the Quiet Revolution. His face, held in close-up and medium close-up for most of the film, is “familiar,” a naturalizing connotation of “home” that befits the cinema of a small nation (Hjort and Petrie, 2007), in producing not distant and paradoxical stars but something known and closer (something similar might be said of the presence of Micheline Lanctôt). Indeed, those faces might be seen to be continuous with the setting: a “heartland” of Quebec consisting of forest and agriculture but mainly here the former, and of decaying clapboard homesteads. These landscapes of recognition, which for Homi Bhabha correspond to “the recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity” (1990, 295), are therefore also mindscapes. Final confrontations take place in and around a disused mine, the gray palettes of which call to mind, at least for this spectator, the opening sequences of one of Quebec’s most important films, Mon oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine, Claude Jutra, 1971), and the crucial place of the 1949 Asbestos strike in Quiet Revolution historiography. Wherefore, then, the unsettling horror, and what characterizes this horror movie? The answers lie in its ambition to play on ambiguity rather than, or as well as, affect. There is blood and gore, and the camera is itself “splashed” on more than one occasion, but more often the violence takes place out of field. Instead, the ambiguity characteristic of the

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art-house movie (Bordwell, 1979) is smuggled in via the uncanny. Freud’s famous 1919 essay emphasizes, of course, that what should be hidden—a human’s repressed impulses—is projected on to the Other, for example monsters. It would be coherent to go down that psychoanalytic road with Les affamés, as we have seen, but for our national-allegorical purposes let us dwell on the ambiguity of the term “uncanny,” that is “unhomely,” from the German unheimlich as the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, “meaning ‘familiar’, ‘native’, ‘belonging to the home.’” The uncanny “is thus that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud, 2003, 124). Freitag and Loiselle make a connection between “The uncanny impression that familiarity has become bizarre and malignant” (2013, 198) and Quebec’s cultural and spatial fragmentation. Les affamés is replete with uncanny overturnings and reversals. The distribution of gherkins by Thérèse, the only food available during a pause in the desperate flight, is reminiscent of that of the communion wafer in the Catholic mass. The hunt in the forest, so embedded in Quebec culture and indeed film iconography (Le temps d’une chasse/ The Time of the Hunt, Francis Mankiewicz, 1972; La bête lumineuse/ The Shimmering Beast, Pierre Perrault, 1982; Un zoo la nuit/Night Zoo, Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1987) becomes here an alertness to zombie attack. The carefully constructed soundscape of the film, which has labored to produce “Quebecness” via the accents and the popular ribald vocabulary of jokes, is also preoccupied with the relation between silence and sound, given that the zombies are attracted by the latter. An aerial shot of the forest at dusk is accompanied not by the predictable and very commonly represented loon calls, for example, but by zombie cries. At one point, the familiar trope of the snapping twig signaling the presence of prey is reversed, as the human survivors are now themselves the prey. (In the famous scene at the climax of Le temps d’une chasse, a similar landscape and soundscape result in tragedy.) Above all, it is the zombies who are literally “homely” and “unhomely,” they are “us,” “our” family and neighbors, and the film is in part a meditation on grief and mourning. Our first sight of Ti-Cul (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), the young boy who is later killed by Céline after becoming infected, comes just after he has shot his own infected mother dead. Thérèse’s grief at the death of Vézina is dwelt upon in a long shot of her slapping Bonin, and falling to her knees. Unsurprisingly, the only survivor of this band is the child Zoé. The final shot of the film continues the mystery of the towers of objects. As

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a zoom shot passes the now zombified Bonin and Tania, it closes in on a colorful parrot. This rather paroxystic example of art movie closing ambiguity—from final girl to final parrot—invites questions without answers: another household artifact? An implausible sign of “nature” taking over, disrespectful of natural boundaries? I prefer to approach this, and the towers, by suggesting another level of allegorical work, that of absence, aporia, of the repressed returning. For what dimension of North American history and of Quebec society has so far been entirely absent from and unmentioned by Les affamés? For a film so invested in connotation, the visual and other references to hunting, the Eastern Woodlands landscapes, the exposure of Western consumer detritus, Céline’s war cry when she attacks the zombies with a machete, the towers that resemble ziggurats but also the totem poles of the Northwest Pacific coast, colonizing settlers usurped by new colonizers, the parrot as one of the exotic creatures brought back and displayed to Europe by Columbus,5 one suggestion seems inevitable: the First Nations. In proposing this, I allow a deferred element of zombie film analysis and criticism to take its rightful place in this discussion, namely that of the genre’s imbrication with race. As is well known, the zombie myth originates in Haitian vodun, when a person is killed and brought back to life, unaware and mute, through magical means, to serve the command of the vodun priest. White Zombie (Edward Halperin, 1932), in which a white woman is zombified but rescued, is the first Hollywood horror movie to take up the reference, at a time when Haiti was under military occupation by the United States. A long demonization of Haiti, and indeed a terror of what happened there, in white Western, and especially American, culture dates from Haiti’s successful slave revolution in the 1790s–1800s. The zombie’s origins therefore lie in the powerlessness of the colonial slave and, subsequently, that of those living under capitalism, in the fear of those masses, and in the reestablishment of intellectual moral superiority over barbarian superstition. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which renewed the genre by introducing the vampire-like theme of contagion, in fact famously preserves race as a central theme. An African-American character assumes a leadership role in the humans’ defense against the creatures, but is killed by white vigilantes when he is mistaken for one of the “ghouls” (as they are referred to in the film), in a scene just as horrifying as the zombie killings, reminiscent of a lynching. Sarah Juliet Lauro is thus justified in claiming that “Our modern zombie is a palimpsest” (2017, 6), for it contains these past histories even when other (hi)stories are written over it.

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Moreover, in ways that speak both to the content of Les affamés and the political agendas surrounding Indigenous populations, Kerstin Orloff has argued that the zombie is also “an ecological figure, encoding the rift between humans and their natural environment perpetrated by capitalism” (2012, 31), given colonialism’s early agenda, with regard to African slaves and Indigenous people, of inferiorizing certain categories of humans and of subordinating “nature.” The appropriation of human bodies went hand in hand with the appropriation of land for economic exploitation. One of the reversals in Les affamés involves the fact of now zombified white farmers and hunters (but the descendants of colons, as we have seen) alienated and severed completely from their already impecunious and marginalized relationship with the land, forests, and fields, a clue perhaps to their empty staring at the artifacts they construct in the latter. Tellingly, Orloff writes of Romero’s films often featuring “hordes of zombies senselessly walking across fields. Zombies could never be farmers, gardeners or planters, professions that would have to be founded on a long-term relation to the land” (2012, 42). Here I differ somewhat from George MacLeod’s use of Orloff’s piece, as he writes, “The zombies in Aubert’s film appear literally rooted in the fields in which they grew up, contemplating the possessions that may have given structure and meaning to their lives in these rural spaces” (2021, 108). I would argue that the uncanny reversals of Quebec life and culture offered in Les affamés are consistent with the zombies’ behavior here, that they are alienated from the environment that was once theirs, and that the artifacts in the fields act in some way as mental portals to both household memories and, as with the very final shot, to colonial histories. Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum completes our passage to those histories, and to preoccupations with land (including rivers) and ecology. Quebec films that place Indigenous peoples at their center are numerous and diverse, and in many cases have appropriated the figure of the “Indian” to address questions of Quebec nationhood and what we might term national masculinities.6 At the same time, there has been a historic presence on the National Film Board of First Nations documentary filmmakers such as the Albertan Métis Gil Cardinal, and the Québécoise Alanis Obomsawin, of the Abenaki nation. In recent years, notable fictional feature films have been produced by white directors collaborating closely and creatively with Indigenous communities and artists: Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (Before the Streets, 2016), most of whose dialogue is in Atikamekw, and Myriam Verreault’s Kuessipan (2019),

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based on the book by Naomi Fontaine, of the Innu nation. Leriche has also worked with Wapikoni Mobile, which educates, mentors, and trains First Nations youth in film and filmmaking through the use of mobile studios.7 Moreover, Jeff Barnaby’s film, and his previous, Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), about the residential schools system, are examples of what has been termed a “new wave of Indigenous cinema,” following, in the Quebec context, the first fictional feature directed by a First Nations artist, Mesnak (2011), by the established Huron-Wendat playwright Yves Sioui Durand. We must also cite recent fictional features by Sonia Bonspille Boileau (Le dep, 2015; Rustic Oracle, 2019), and Caroline Monnet (Bootlegger, 2021). That “new wave” can be seen as “a global movement […] Indigenous cinema, unlike other national cinemas—if we want to group it in there— isn’t actually bound by traditional borders” as it denotes “a movement made up of artists who are motivated by similar concerns working on projects that interconnect” (Ojibwe writer, broadcaster, and producer Jesse Wente, quoted in Dudemaine et al., 2020, 27). These remarks are a salutary reminder of the complex, porous, and shifting nature of the national and other communities addressed and interrogated in formulations such as “national cinema,” as well as the need for specific historical awarenesses when wielding terms such as the “transnational.” Nonetheless, it is, I argue, justifiable to discuss Blood Quantum in the context of Quebec cinema, and not only for the creative and production context (filmmaker born in Quebec, film set and shot there, production company—Prospector Films—based in Montreal; we should also note, beyond this, the distribution deal with the US streaming service Shudder), as long as we understand the pluralizing and open-ended possibilities of that term, and how the internally diverse components of “Quebec” not only radically interrogate that category but connect laterally with other, global positions. That interrogation is at the genesis of Barnaby’s project. Jeff Barnaby (1976–2022) was born on a Mi’kmaq reserve at Listuguj, which gave its name to the Restigouche River. The setting of Blood Quantum is crucially important in the film, and it was largely shot in that area (along with the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve outside Montreal). The reserve lies on the northern, Quebec side of the Restigouche, with the J. C. Van Horne Interprovincial Bridge linking the municipality of Pointe-à-la-Croix to the New Brunswick town of Campbellton. The area, opened up to Europeans when the French set up a trading post with the Mi’kmaq for fish and furs, has been the site of two famous historical dramas. In 1760 the Battle of Restigouche marked the final naval clash

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between the British and French in the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) for possession of North America. The numbers of the French forces were swelled not only by their Mi’kmaq allies but, echoed in the film as we shall see, by refugees from the Acadian expulsions. Following the British victory, the Mi’kmaq’s second language has been mainly English, and this is the main language of the film. On a smaller scale but highly significant in our context, Listuguj was the site in 1981, the year Blood Quantum is set, of a clash over salmon fishing rights between the Quebec provincial government and the Mi’kmaq, which led to a heavy-handed, indeed brutal police response. The crisis and its aftermath were the subject of a 1984 documentary by Alanis Obomsawin, Les événements de Restigouche (Incident at Restigouche), in which she argues with the Fisheries Minister in the Parti Québécois government, Lucien Lessard, about the contradictions of the sovereignty project in relation to Quebec’s First Nations populations. Barnaby has said in interviews, including a Q&A at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, that he has memories as a four-year-old of the confrontation, and that Obomsawin’s films made him understand the role of cinema in political engagement. He made the actors auditioning watch Les événements de Restigouche (Black, 2020). (The looming presence and role of the bridge in the film, here defensively blocked in particularly gruesome fashion, calls to mind that of the Pont Mercier, barricaded by Mohawk protestors during the Oka crisis of 1990, and prominent in Obomsawin’s 1993 documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance.) In a sense, the problematizing of Quebec nationalism is one staging post in the film’s wider critique of Western colonialism. On one level, Blood Quantum offers familiar zombie genre fare, including blood and gore even more spectacular than in Les affamés, with key characters shown being eaten alive. Zombie films usually begin with the slow build-up of the outbreak, and here, in an evocation of historical events, on the “Red Crow” reserve the family patriarch, Gisigu (Stonehorse Lone Goeman) discovers that the salmon he has just fished and gutted are still moving, and his son Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), a member of the reserve’s police force, finds that his ex-wife Joss’s (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) dog, which he has just dispatched by gunshot in an act of mercy, is animated too. The narrative comes to center on this family, along with their troubled son Joseph (Forrest Goodluck), whose white girlfriend Charlie (Olivia Scriven) is pregnant, and his even more enraged half-brother, Alan Lysol (Kiowa Gordon). It becomes clear that the First Nations characters are in fact immune to the apocalyptic

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Fig. 6.2: Blood Quantum

virus. Half an hour into the film, and six months later in the story, the survivors are holed up in a heavily defended compound, and go on sorties to hunt zombies. The camp has also become a haven for white refugees (“townies”), much to Lysol’s angry protestations (“They’ve never seen a brown man since their grandparents owned one”), and eventually he deliberately wrecks it by bringing in an infected young woman. Traylor is eaten alive, and Gisigu fights off zombies with a samurai sword, allowing the final survivors to escape by boat: Joss, Joseph, and Charlie, now infected, who asks to be shot dead after she gives birth. The film’s title refers to a legacy of colonial North America and then the United States, obsessed with racial classifications that were imposed on, and in some cases adopted by, colonized peoples: the “one-drop” rule that saw French Caribbean categories of métissage swept aside in Louisiana as everyone under them became “black,” and the federal Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 which formalized the way fractions of native ancestry (variably quantified by different communities) worked in terms of legal recognition (Harmon, 2021). In Canada, “blood quantum” is

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not mentioned as such in the 1876 Indian Act and its aftermath, but the legislation’s central term of “status” (and “non-status”) performs the same function of intergenerational surveillance.8 The Act does not apply to the Métis or Inuit. In the film, the term is firstly one of many ways in which colonial terms and representations are thrown back, through narrative, mise-en-scène, and irony. Some element in the native peoples’ blood prevents infection, everyone else is infected by the slightest transfer from a zombie. Here it is the “Indians” who man and defend the fort or stockade enclosed by palisades, and it is white people, not they, who are disappearing, with tropes from Westerns (such as the brief Mexican stand-off between Joss and Lysol) figuring a cultural reappropriation of what was already a form of cultural appropriation, mirroring the film’s treatment of what the zombie genre did to its Haitian vodun antecedents. Gisigu’s samurai sword is emblematic of the reality of Indigenous people’s freedom to roam across and deploy global cultural forms, as with this film’s take on the genre. Secondly, however, “blood” in Blood Quantum is associated with sexuality and reproduction in ways which speak to an alternative vision of intergenerational relations. Gory scenes include a white woman with an Indigenous partner eating her aborted baby and Lysol being fellated by a zombie who munches on his cock. But even beyond the genre the theme recurs: Lysol’s rather repellent account of his face bloodied after performing oral sex on a menstruating girlfriend, and Charlie’s childbirth ordeal in the final scenes. The fundamental brotherly conflict between Lysol and Joseph lies in the rejection or embrace of racial mixing, whether in the compound or in sexual and reproductive relations. The final baby girl, who may or may not be infected but in whom the film seems to place a fragile hope, as fragile as the tiny boat in the final shots—with grandmother and granddaughter in frame—isolated on a large body of water, is a result of mixed relations in a world seemingly dominated by zombies, who of course cannot reproduce. This dimension can lead us into a psychoanalytic allegorical reading, and/or into an analysis of gender roles in the film, which in themselves are fairly conventional, including Joss as mother, nurse, and caregiver. Lysol, for example, who throughout the film has fixated on his lost mother and raged at his absent father, Traylor, inflicts the zombified Lilith (Natalie Liconti, we note the name of a demon in Jewish mythology) on the compound—and stabs his brother—after his more than symbolic castration. His quest for a hypostasized, unified community can be read as consistent with that lack-filling phallocentric

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agenda, a trait compatible with many nationalisms. However, I wish to stay with the intergenerational theme in order to link it to time, memory, and the Indigenous experience. For the film also hints at mythical allegorical dimensions which go beyond those of simply a reverse zombie narrative, which would be inadequate to account, for example, for the profound differences that the Lysol-Joseph conflict encapsulates in what is a community distinctly non-unified in its response to their collective immunity against infection. There is a three-way balancing act, or even perhaps dialectic, in the film between identity and difference, in the positing of a unified, transmittable heritage from the past (the first shot of Gisigu and his ancestral fishing practice, echoed in the final boat scenes and the new generation), crisis and conflict in the form of the Cain and Abel relationship between Lysol and Joseph, and the final hybrid outcome. It is a major achievement of the film not only to portray these differences, but also to portray them as bound up with identity formation. Stuart Hall’s well-known essay “Who Needs Identity?” argues for the recognition of difference even and especially when subaltern identities are vehicles of political agency and struggle. Invoking Foucault, Hall writes: “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation” (1996, 4). One of the film’s “reversals” is to see Lysol reproduce colonialism and other power structures’ identity assignments: “Throughout their careers, identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their power to exclude, to leave out, to render ‘outside’, abjected” (Hall, 1996, 5). However, and this is a major caveat, a possible universal-humanist reading of the film’s ending is tempered by the visceral force of the horror genre, and the way it dovetails with questions of memory, trauma, and apocalypse of which Lysol’s anger partakes. The biblical references are not inappropriate here: the film strives to offer some kind of transcendent, or at least transhistorical dimension. The opening “ancient settler proverb,” in fact from Exodus 34:12–13 and 15–16, carefully omitting verse fourteen’s admonition to worship the one true Lord, hijacks the Western Christian text’s inferiorizing of the heathen Other and prohibition of mixed marriage by adumbrating a time of catastrophe and inappropriate consumption when “treaties” are signed.

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There are scenes set in churches (the defeat of the “purist” faction takes place there) or with a church in the background (the final Lysol-Joseph confrontation after which the former is devoured), but also in one of three animated sequences created by Daniel Gies and his team at E*D Films in Montreal. The first, four minutes in, constructs an origin myth with, against a background of smoky apocalypse, a pregnant woman whose locks meld with tendrils and roots in the soil as the image pans down to the reflection of the fetus in the water. There is an immediate cut to the “real” Restigouche River, and to establishing shots of the area at disorienting angles. The second, just before Lysol’s destruction of the compound, has him standing erect, warrior-like, with a church in the background, pyres of bodies piled high around him. The third, eighty-five minutes in, is a representation of Gisigu’s last stand, with, in Mi’kmaq, the dialogue “None of you will cross this line,” echoing a statement made by an elderly gentleman in Les événements de Restigouche.9 In an interview, Barnaby has described the first scene as framing his work as “an environmental catastrophe film,” and the purpose of these sequences as emphasizing fictionality (Saito, 2020). In addition, I would argue that the sequences link to Traylor’s last statement, urging Joss to ensure his grandchildren know what he has done, implying relays of storytelling that cross generations and time. For the film implies three apocalypses: not only the zombie takeover and then the annihilation of the protagonists’ safe compound, but that which preceded it—the experience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas confronted by displacement, cultural eradication, and European-borne disease. This is a clue to the “futurity” implied in the final scenes of Blood Quantum, a reworking of historical time in an attempt to deal with the traumas of those events. Writing about Barnaby’s earlier films, Kristina Baudemann describes “works that mediate future-oriented thinking despite a traumatic past” (2019, 151). Barnaby’s artistic practice thus articulates “the history of colonial trauma through speculative tropes that multiply possible plots and outcomes” (Baudemann, 2019, 155). Memory and trauma are here written into the genre appropriation. This is equally true of characters in the diegesis: it is made clear, for example, that Lysol is profoundly damaged by his environment and experiences in foster care, and this apparent villain of the piece is also to be read as already a victim of intergenerational trauma, an explanation and even a justification of his anger. (Indeed, the opening section shows that Red Crow is already a community ravaged by alcohol, drug abuse, racial divisions, broken families, and delinquency.) Blood Quantum is

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a film about wounds and wounding—the original meaning of trauma (“The word trauma comes from the Greek trauma [τραύμα] meaning trauma wound, alteration of trōma; akin to Greek titrōskein = to wound, tetrainein = to pierce” [Kolaitis and Olff, 2017, 1])—that are both physical and psychological, and, above all, remembered. Here, the individual and collective experiences in Jameson’s analysis of allegory coincide: Lysol is the—perhaps allegorical—figure who “acts out” the traumatic event, where the individual is unable to separate themselves from the experience. The individual either refuses or is forced to repeat the loss/event through internal self-torment, guilt, compulsive behavior, denial. In contrast, the film as a whole seems—the ending is ambiguous—to “work through” the trauma and to provide a future in which the traumatic event(s) might be externalized rather than introjected. In 2021, Quebec cinema’s third foray into the zombie genre was released. Like Les affamés and Blood Quantum but in more comedic mode, Brain Freeze (directed by Julien Knafo) summarizes new interfaces in terms of Quebec cinema’s relations with popular film genres, and with the global, in terms of both production context and meanings generated or interpreted. The palimpestic zombie genre, containing layers and accretions of world and film history, is here enabled to speak both to local, national agendas and to their imbrication in global injustices and indeed crises, notably the ecological.10 In Brain Freeze, a wealthy suburb falls prey to a zombie pandemic when the chemicals a fertilizer firms uses to keep golf courses accessible in winter gets into the water supply. Here those accretions of allegorical readings formed in the genre’s history reach a culmination in which the film needs no decoding, no allegorization, laying on with a trowel its narrative of business corruption, right-wing shock jocks, and Covid parallels. “What lies beneath” may be the offending chemical, but meanings here are transparent, on the surface. In contrast, by illustrating the ways in which popular genres can be appropriated by a small, minoritized industry that potentially swerves away from major, dominant positions, Les affamés and Blood Quantum offer complex, allegorical takes on the horrors experienced by individuals and groups, and, through this unveiling of a “structure of multiple meanings” (see Jameson, 2019, quoted above) suggest continuities between alienation, trauma and memory, and wider collective identifications, be they Québécois, Mi’kmaq, Indigenous American populations, or the existence of humans in the fragile ecosystems of the planet. In the case of Blood Quantum in particular,

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the daring seizing of the zombie allegoresis produces a counter-historical narrative and transhistorical myth, in which blood moves from gory spectacle to more intimate undercurrents and meditations on ancestry, memory, and the maternal. Works Cited Adler, Howard. Status: A Film by 1890091701. 2014. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=y4IMXLYMQ3U. Baudemann, Kristina. “Indigenous Futurist Film: Speculation and Resistance in Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls and File Under Miscellaneous.” Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes. Eds. Amy J. Ransom and Dominick Grace. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 151–165. Bertrand, Karine. “Canadian Indigenous Cinema: From Alanis Obomsawin to the Wapikoni Mobile.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and William Straw. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019a. 105–124. ——. “Le cinéma autochtone au Québec, entre représentation et ré-appropriation.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019b): 221–240. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291–322. Black, Sarah-Tai. “Blood Quantum’s Jeff Barnaby on the History and Horror of His Indigenous Zombie Movie: ‘I feel like I barely got out of this one alive.’” The Globe and Mail (27 April 2020). Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism 4.1 (1979): 56–64. Dudemaine, André, Gabriel Marcoux, and Isabelle St-Amand. “Indigenous Cinema and Media in the Americas: Storytelling, Communities, and Sovereignties.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29.1 (2020): 27–51. Edwards, Justin, Rue Grauland, and Johan Höglund, eds. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Everett-Green, Robert. “Zombie Film Echoes Quebec’s Cultural Fears.” The Globe and Mail (20 October 2017). Freitag, Gina and André Loiselle. “Tales of Terror in Québec Popular Cinema: The Rise of the French Language Horror Film since 2000.” American Review of Canadian Studies 43.2 (2013): 190–203.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 1–17. Harmon, Maya. “Blood Quantum and the White Gatekeeping of Native American Identity.” California Law Review Online (April 2021). https://www.californialawreview.org / blood-quantum-and-thewhite-gatekeeping-of-native-american-identity. Hjort, Mette and Duncan Petrie, eds. The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso, 2019. ——. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–148. Kolaitis, Gerasimos and Miranda Olff. “Psychotraumatology in Greece.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 8 (2017). doi: 10.1080/ 20008198.2017.1351757. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, ed. Zombie Theory: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. MacLeod, George. “Brain Drain: Rural Poverty and the Quebecois Zombie Film.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 25.1 (2021): 106–115. Marshall, Bill. “Quebec Cinema as Global Cinema.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and William Straw. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 251–267. ——. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Orloff, Kerstin. “‘Greening’ the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-Ecological Degradation.” Green Letters 16.1 (2012): 31–45. Saito, Stephen. “Interview: Jeff Barnaby on Developing Survival Skills for a Zombie Plague in ‘Blood Quantum’” (2020). https://moveablefest.com/ jeff-barnaby-blood-quantum/. Vervaeke John, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017.

Notes 1. These figures are based on estimates from the author and on lists compiled by fans. See: https://www.shtfblog.com/zombie-movies-list/. 2. “Now none of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant, but their very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbol—the killer shark—lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together. As a

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symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator” (Jameson, 1979, 142). 3. For a fuller discussion of these intensifications and remappings of Quebec cinema since 2000, see Marshall (2019). 4. I here consider film production from the period 1944–1954 to be understood as a “French-Canadian cinema” that presents distinct problematics from the cinema that emerged with and after the Quiet Revolution. 5. I am reminded here of a shot in Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (2012) of a sugar jar which arbitrarily and unconsciously seems to evoke colonial history. 6. For a discussion of films made up to 2000, see Marshall (2001, 239–262), and for an up-to-date list, https://aimetoncinema.ca/fr/autochtone. 7. See Chapter 1 in this volume, by Michael Gott, for a brief discussion of another film that resulted in the director’s work with Wapikoni Mobile, Une colonie by Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. For a more extensive discussion of Indigenous filmmaking, see Bertrand (2019a) and (2019b). 8. See the short Status (2014) by half-Jewish, half-Anishinaabe filmmaker Howard Adler for further explanation, and protest. 9. The vast majority of Blood Quantum’s dialogue is in English, but in intimate moments, and at crucial times, it switches to Mi’kmaq: Traylor’s last words; the “villainous” character Moon (played by Gary Farmer, the most established actor in the film) declaring, “The Earth is an animal, the Whites didn’t realize it”; and the linguistic confrontation when the natives are discussing what do with new white arrivals, prompting the response, “What are you doing? Speak English!,” another reversal of the film in terms of language and minorization. 10. Edwards et al. (2022) explores this link further.

PART III

Case Studies

chapter seven

Between Montreal and Los Angeles Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in the Transnational Cinemas of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve Gemma King Between Montreal and Los Angeles For Jean-Marc Vallée, who tragically died at the age of fifty-eight at his home in Berthier-sur-Mer, Quebec, on Christmas Day 2021, in between the first and second drafts of this chapter.

Introduction Whether it’s in America, Quebec, or France, if I can tell a story that takes me out of my comfort zone, then I’m surfing. Jean-Marc Vallée (in Hertz, 2014)

While Quebec cinema has always been defined by tensions between the national and the regional, Quebec cinema of the 21st century is also increasingly enmeshed with the transnational. Yet, as the work of prominent Québécois directors such as Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve reveals, the transnationalism of contemporary Quebec film serves to emphasize rather than to eclipse the cultural specificity of the francophone province and its filmmaking capital, Montreal. In the introduction to their 2019 special issue of Contemporary French Civilization on Quebec screens, Mercédès Baillargeon and Karine Bertrand write of a contemporary Quebec cinema that engages with diverse transnational forces without being subsumed by them: “where national and local expressions are not lost in the maelstrom of

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globalization, but carve themselves a place and are transmitted within it” (2019, 139–140).1 This cinema interacts with many filmmaking hubs, including in anglophone Canada, France, and the UK, as well as North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. However, the tensions between the regional, the national, and the supranational are perhaps most pronounced in films produced between Montreal and Hollywood. In the 2010s and 2020s, an increasing number of Québécois filmmakers are being drawn to projects based in, though not limited to, the Hollywood studio system.2 The most prominent of these are Vallée and Villeneuve, whose career trajectories share striking parallels. Both began by directing low-budget, French-language shorts and features in Montreal in the late 1990s, with Vallée’s first feature Liste noire (Black List) appearing in 1995 and Villeneuve’s Un 32 août sur terre (August 32nd on Earth) in 1998. Their earliest films already engaged with the world beyond the province: Un 32 août’s characters travel to Utah, Villeneuve’s first ever project, the 1994 short RER FFWD, is set in Kingston, Jamaica, and Vallée’s second feature Los Locos (1997) is a US-set Western written by Mario Van Peebles. However, in the mid-to-late 2000s, both directors began to incorporate more substantial transnational elements into their Quebec-based work. Vallée’s 2005 C.R.A.Z.Y. is set in a Quiet Revolution-era Montreal with French dialogue, but is heavily steeped in 1970s British and US rock music culture. It is also a Canada/Morocco coproduction and includes a sequence in which the protagonist travels to Israel, which was shot on location in Morocco. Meanwhile, Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010) is set partly in Montreal in French, but mostly in a thinly fictionalized Lebanon in Arabic. C.R.A.Z.Y. and Incendies are widely considered to be Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s respective “breakout” projects (Robinson, 2023, 27), and both directors have described how these films led to offers for larger anglophone contracts (“From Polytechnique, I started to get scripts and after Incendies, of course, it exploded” [Villeneuve, quoted in Douglas, 2013]). Directly following these breakout films, both directors collaborated with European coproduction partners. Vallée directed the US-UK coproduction The Young Victoria in 2009 and the France-Canada coproduction Café de Flore in 2011. And in 2013, Villeneuve released the Toronto-set, English-language, Canada-France-Spain coproduction Enemy, starring US actor Jake Gyllenhaal. 3 Finally, in the 2010s both Vallée and Villeneuve began to work more frequently in Hollywood. In 2013, the same year as Enemy, Villeneuve released his first US-set film,

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Prisoners, also starring Gyllenhaal. That same year, Vallée broke onto the Hollywood scene with his multiple Oscar-winning character piece starring Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club. The directors have since worked primarily in the US: Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016), Bladerunner 2049 (2017), and Dune (2021), and Vallée’s Wild (2014), Demolition (2015), the first season of HBO’s Big Little Lies (2017), and HBO mini-series Sharp Objects (2018). When he passed away tragically in December 2021, Vallée’s next, unnamed project was in US pre-production. In the later years of his career, Vallée had become particularly involved in the HBO system, Big Little Lies arguably rivalling Dallas Buyers Club for his best-known work. At the time of writing, Villeneuve had two large-scale Hollywood productions in post-production and production, respectively: Dune: Part Two and Cleopatra. A cursory glance at Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s careers suggests a progression from art-house francophone filmmaking with roots and inspiration in Quebec’s cinéma direct movement to the commercial anglophone blockbusters of the US. As Ian Robinson writes of Vallée and Villeneuve, as well as Philippe Falardeau and Kim Nguyen, “These directors have advanced their careers by crossing over from popular and art house French-language Quebec cinema to Englishlanguage American indie and Hollywood filmmaking […] their careers have all followed a similar trajectory in which a broadly critical and commercial success in Canadian and international markets paved the way for entry into American markets” (2023, 27). Journalistic coverage of Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s “move to Hollywood” has also been framed in these terms. In 2015, James Mottram published an interview with Villeneuve entitled “Sicario Director Denis Villeneuve Interview: Charting His Amazing Rise from the Canadian Arthouse to Blade Runner 2.” And in 2016, Drew Hunt wrote of Vallée’s career, “After earning widespread recognition in his native Quebec—his debut film, Liste noire, was the highest-grossing Québécois film released that year, and C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) is regarded as a high watermark of the country’s native cinema—he’s become one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for gritty, emotionally raw projects.” However, reading Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s careers as linear paths away from Quebec and towards Hollywood risks erasing the interplay between the local and the global that has marked their work from the beginning. For Hollywood has always impacted even their most “Québécois” texts, and Quebec continues to shape even their most “Hollywood” ones.

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Indeed, Jean-Marc Vallée’s and Denis Villeneuve’s more recent, US-based films are remarkably transnational and translingual in ways that recall what Thibaut Schilt describes as “the tremendous diversity of the [21st century] filmmaking industry in Quebec” (2018, 192). For example, Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival features Hollywood stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker and is set mostly in Montana, but was filmed and produced in Montreal with dialogue not only in English, but also in Mandarin, Russian, and an invented extra-terrestrial code. And while Vallée’s later film and television works are less obviously translingual, they are consistently shaped by the Québécois tradition of cinéma direct and themes of regional versus national identities. Such texts counter the hegemonic and Eurocentric narratives of Hollywood as a monolingual or monistic space. Villeneuve in particular has described himself as working within a broader “North American” space that both encompasses and extends beyond the traditional Canadian and US filmmaking centers of Montreal and Los Angeles, respectively (Villeneuve, 2015). Of course, in most cases, Quebec films are less visible on the international stage than Hollywood ones. Hollywood deals in bigger budgets, production scales, domestic audiences, and international exportability (not least thanks to the global lingua franca of English). Yet, despite these differences, Quebec and Hollywood cinemas share a number of commonalities. Both are formed at the nexus of the national and the international, but also the subnational: Quebec in its status as province within the broader nation of Canada, and Hollywood as a system—often but not always centered on Los Angeles—within the broader context of the US. Both Montreal and Hollywood situate themselves as culturally and economically distinct filmmaking hubs which, while self-sufficient, also find themselves engaged in a complex production network that extends beyond their national context. Montreal (alongside Toronto and Vancouver) and Los Angeles are the primary filmmaking cities of the nations of Canada and the United States, but they are neither fully representative of these nation states, nor limited to them. As directors such as Vallée and Villeneuve produce increasingly transnational work, the lines between Canadian, Québécois, and US national cinemas are both overdetermined and overlapping. At once subnational and transnational, Quebec and Hollywood cinemas neither expand to fit nor are contained within the totalizing contours of any “nation.” Writing seventeen years after the publication of his formative book Quebec National Cinema, Bill Marshall emphasized the tension between the

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national, the subnational, and the transnational that defines the Quebec cinema of the 21st century: [There has been] frequent discussion of a “global” or “transnational” turn in Quebec cinema since 2000, fueled by Oscar and other international successes, the Hollywood careers of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve, the Xavier Dolan phenomenon (Kotte, 2015). Rather than the “national” being replaced, we might refer to an intensification of the processes and tensions previously outlined: not only is the nation not going away, it is to misrecognize “the national” to see it as not already implicated in a relation to plurality and the world. (2018, 326)

This chapter investigates Jean-Marc Vallée’s and Denis Villeneuve’s filmmaking careers not as linear departures from Montreal to Los Angeles, but as perpetual returns. It reads their US-based work against the grain: not as a narrative of small-time Quebec directors “making it big” in Hollywood, but as one of a transnational cinematic perspective honed in Quebec, which decenters the Hollywood apparatus from within. It sees Quebec cinema as engaged in an eternal hybridizing process by which it is ever focused inward and expanding outward, producing transnational, translingual, and transcultural texts as it does so. The chapter situates itself in a framework that has been elaborated by two key Quebec cinema scholars over the past two decades. The first of these is Marshall, author of the aforementioned monograph Quebec National Cinema, to which this volume responds, who wrote of Quebec cinema’s “constant tension between forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity, between the centripetal and centrifugal” (2001, 3). The second is Thibaut Schilt, one of the editors of the present volume, who wrote in his earlier co-edited collection Cinéma-monde of Quebec cinema as, “like the province itself in its relationship to the outside world, a unique paradigm […] that looks both inward, questioning its own evolving identity as a culturally distinct region (and self-sufficient cinematic hub) of the world, and outward, as global influences (filmic and otherwise) inexorably affect its present and shape its future” (2018, 211). Combining Marshall’s image of “centripetal and centrifugal forces” and Schilt’s image of a cinema at once looking inward and outward, this chapter charts the transnational careers of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve as key examples of these perpetual dual impulses. Rather than a narrative of abandoning the local, francophone, provincial filmmaking world of Montreal for the globalized, anglophone, big-budget pastures of

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Hollywood, it reads Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s Hollywood work as continuing to engage with and be informed by Quebec cinema. Looking Inwards: Quebec Cinema as Internal Diversity Cinema is an art form that is designed to go across borders. And as a filmmaker, the only way I can direct a movie is when I feel close to my culture. Seriously. I am a product of my culture. When I directed Prisoners, the director whose work I felt closest to was Michel Brault. Denis Villeneuve (in Monk, 2014)

Quebec is not unique in its composition as a multicultural, multilingual society. However, the francophone Canadian province is a particularly intense site of relationalities between linguistic, national, regional, Indigenous, settler, and migrant identities. These relationalities give way to a fundamental internal diversity that plays out in Montreal as a cinematic city, in the careers of the filmmakers trained there, and in the narratives, dialogue, settings, production, cast, and crew of Québécois films themselves. As Denis Bachand suggests, “infiltrated on all sides by transnational cultural trends, Québécois cinema is inscribed in a process of opening up to the Other which transforms it, all the while ensuring the development of its specificity” (2019, 164).4 Perhaps the most obvious dimension of this internal diversity is the province’s official bilingualism in French and English, born of a colonial rivalry that has eclipsed the area’s original Indigenous multilinguality. While French and English are the official languages of the broader nation of Canada, Quebec is the only majority francophone region of the North American continent. As per the 2016 data, 45 percent of Québécois are bilingual in French and English (compared to only 18 percent across Canada) and 50 percent of Québécois speak only French.5 Despite Canada’s national bilingual status, Quebec’s position as a francophone minority surrounded by an anglophone majority has led to a protectionist tendency and even the introduction of some French language quotas in its film industry. This dynamic is visible in the multitude of monolingual French-language films produced within the region (among them Vallée’s Liste noire and Villeneuve’s 2009 Polytechnique). Yet it is also reflected in the range of films which interrogate Canadian bilingualism and the differences between Quebec and anglophone Canada. French director Philippe Lioret’s Le fils de Jean (A Kid, 2016), with its bilingual

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characters from Montreal, Vancouver, and Paris, is an example of this, as is Villeneuve’s transition from a francophone Montreal setting in Incendies to the anglophone Toronto one in his following film, Enemy. This bilingualism has also led a number of Québécois filmmakers to transnational coproductions with France and the UK. Xavier Dolan’s 2016 Canada-France coproduction Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World) was set and filmed in Montreal, but with an entirely metropolitan French star cast including Gaspard Ulliel, Nathalie Baye, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, and Marion Cotillard. Villeneuve’s Incendies is also a Canada-France coproduction, while Vallée’s Café de Flore is a bilingual coproduction set and filmed in Montreal and Paris. Finally, Vallée’s first US-produced film, the English-language The Young Victoria, was set entirely in and coproduced by the UK. Both Vallée and Villeneuve have also spoken extensively about their upbringing in a Quebec saturated in anglophone pop culture. Villeneuve was inspired by American sci-fi from a young age; he admired Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Frank Herbert, and would later go on to direct the sequel to Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner and an adaptation of Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. He has described these films in the language not of Hollywood blockbusters, but of personal passion projects: the kind of films he dreamed of making when he was growing up. Of course, such expensive studio ventures as Dune and Blade Runner 2049 were neither originated nor greenlighted by Villeneuve himself, but his discussion of these projects is infused with auteurist nostalgia:6 Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s a movie that is linked with my love and passion for cinema. I’m coming from a small town in Quebec where, at that time, there was no Internet, and the way to be in contact with movies were those American fan magazines like “Fantastic Films” and “Starlog,” and I still remember the shock, the impact of seeing the first frames, the first pictures coming out of Blade Runner. (in Chitwood, 2015)

Vallée also described a strong anglophone pop culture heritage, though he was more focused on music than film or literature. When speaking of both his early Quebec-based work and his later US-based films and series, he returned to the fundamental influence of the British and American rock that defined his childhood and adolescence in 1960s and 1970s Montreal. He anchored this in a transcultural context: I was into a lot of British rock and roll. But I loved also American rock and roll. CCR, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Patty Smith and Bob Dylan.

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Rock was my thing. It influences me and moves me, and it’s music that gives me ideas or wings to fly and to make films. (in Fernandez, 2018)

Indeed, Vallée often described rock music as his primary creative driver (“I had written Café de Flore with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in mind”). He deliberately didn’t use composers—and hardly any extradiegetic music—preferring to treat the soundtrack as a component of the art direction. He also credited rock and roll with allowing him to step out of his own experience (as in C.R.A.Z.Y., with its soundtrack filled with David Bowie and the Rolling Stones) and into stories that felt otherwise alien to him. For example, to tell the foreign story of a Missouri woman suffering from alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder in Sharp Objects (2018), he relied on a soundtrack filled with his favorite Led Zeppelin songs, played diegetically through Camille’s (Amy Adams) ubiquitous iPod. Rather than considering American influences as arriving later in Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s careers, it is important to acknowledge their formative presence within the Quebec of their childhoods, and the profound ways in which US pop culture influenced their personal growth as young filmmakers. Denis Bachand emphasizes the extent to which the predominance of Hollywood texts in Quebec informs audience perceptions: “the reception of films of national origin is subjected to an assessment strongly informed by these dominant, even hegemonic, modes of expression” (2019, 154).7

Fig. 7.1: Sharp Objects

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Yet the linguistic and cultural diversity of Quebec and its cinema is far from limited to the interplay between French and English. Much like the cinemas of the US, UK, or France, contemporary Quebec cinema is also shaped by the region’s status as a popular destination for migrants. Villeneuve’s Incendies, an adaptation of Lebanese-Québécois playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s 2003 play of the same name, tells the intergenerational tale of a Lebanese woman’s migration to Quebec, and her twin children’s later return to their mother’s birth country. The following year, Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar (2011), with its trilingual Arabic, English, and French dialogue, related the experience of an Algerian man working in a Montreal primary school, having fled the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. Bachir Bensaddek’s 2016 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) brings a Montreal taxi driver of Algerian origins into contact with an Algerian pop star he believed to have died, but who had also emigrated from their native country.8 Such films explore the transnational connections between Quebec and diverse francophone and arabophone regions in North Africa and the Middle East. It should be noted, however, that Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s films so far do not engage with Indigenous languages and cultures in what is now settler colonial Canada. This is not for lack of a significant if still developing Indigenous filmmaking culture in Quebec, as outlined by Marshall (2018, 333). This includes the work of Indigenous Quebec-based filmmakers such as Alanis Obomsawin (of the Abenaki community, director of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, 1993) and Yves Sioui Durand (of the Huron-Wendat Nation, director of Mesnak, 2011). Marshall also notes a tradition of settler Canadian filmmakers working with Indigenous communities. These include Chloé Leriche’s Avant les rues (Before the Streets, 2016), made in collaboration with the Atikamekw community of northern Quebec, Arthur Lamothe’s long filmography with the Innu, and Manon Barbeau’s collaborative Montreal-based Wapikoni Mobile project, which provides portable film equipment and guidance to First Nations communities to make their own films.9 Despite a lack of deliberate engagement with Indigenous culture and identity in Quebec, it is perhaps not a coincidence that so much of Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s work (Arrival, The Young Victoria, Sicario, Dune) represents themes of colonial expansion, and the inevitable cultural and linguistic diversity of the colonial encounter. In his study of Québécois road movies, a genre that encapsulates the diversity and border-crossing impulses of contemporary Quebec film, Thibaut Schilt describes this cinema as having a uniquely transcultural gaze:

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Contemporary road films look simultaneously inward, offering a window into the lives of Quebec’s current inhabitants within its borders, and outward, borrowing from a now international genre on the one hand, and pondering how twenty-first-century global human movements may shape the future of the francophone province on the other. (2018, 194)

These layers of cultural, national, linguistic, and ethnic diversity that comprise contemporary Quebec are clearly present in Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s early, Montreal-based works. Yet their entry into the so-called hegemony of the Hollywood apparatus has not signaled a departure from these themes, but a deeper exploration of them. Expanding Outwards: A Transnational “Quebecer’s Sensibility” Abroad In a way, the truth is that I was dreaming to do a movie in the United States just because, as a filmmaker, I always loved the idea of trying to make movies in a different culture, in a different way. It’s always interesting to make a movie abroad. All [my] movies so far, most of them had a relationship with the outside. Denis Villeneuve (in Douglas, 2013)

It is important not to underestimate the inherent plurality of Hollywood film, and the many ways in which it has been shaped by the transnational since its inception. Despite this, the dominance of the English language and totalizing perspectives in many Hollywood texts have stood in opposition to the diversity of Quebec film. As Schilt writes, “despite obstacles, Quebec cinema is now increasingly recognized as a successful example of North American, French-language resistance to the hegemony of Hollywood” (2018, 192). As a result, the francophone Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve have often been described as pluralizing and diversifying Hollywood from within. James Mottram labels Villeneuve “anti-Hollywood” (2015), while Jeff Heinrich writes of his “Quebecer’s sensibility” (2015). Though neither further clarifies these terms, the transnational dimensions of Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s Quebec-based films are only intensified in their Hollywood-based ones. For example, language was always central to their Quebec films. However, in Arrival language learning is the primary narrative focus, in Sicario code-switching is a central power strategy, in Dune characters communicate in several verbal languages and one sign language, and in

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Blade Runner 2049 dialogue is spoken in English, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, Somali, and Spanish. From Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s earliest Quebec-set films, characters travel across borders and encounter cultural others beyond their home territory. In more overt examples of this tradition, Sicario weaponizes the border in new, extreme ways, Wild hinges upon the act of physical journeying, and Arrival is centered on the dynamics of translingual contact. Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s earliest films articulate issues of Quebec national and regional identity in relation to the broader Canadian nation. While their US-based films rarely mention this specific relationship, regional tensions are at the heart of Sharp Objects (rural Missouri versus urban St. Louis), Sicario (the US-Mexico border region versus “the American heartland”), and Dune (in which territorial identity politics are scaled up to a planetary level). In his study of Sicario, a violent “war on drugs” thriller, Carlos Gallego describes Villeneuve’s evocation of urban space as ambiguous: “what makes this transnational fantasy cityscape so ideologically alluring is precisely its representational ambiguity—the fact that it is flexible and thus effectually applicable to any specific location” (2018, 60). Gallego refers here to the representation of the US-Mexico border that cuts through the dual cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, but his words could be used to refer to many of Villeneuve’s urban environments. Aesthetic and ontological ambiguity haunts the hyper-technological dystopian metropolis of Blade Runner 2049, the “every man’s America” of Prisoners’s suburban Pennsylvania, and the deliberate anonymity of 20th-century urban architecture in Enemy. This ambiguity is common in a range of films set in Montreal by Vallée, Villeneuve, and others. Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde takes place in suburban Montreal but could be anywhere, as could his 2014 Mommy (though the latter’s Québécois accents are much stronger). Philippe Lesage’s 2018 Genèse (Genesis) captures a sense of universality not only in its deliberately vague setting that is never confirmed to be Montreal, but also in its unclear period (were it not for the mid-2000s flip phone, viewers could be forgiven for thinking the film was set in the 1990s or even the 1970s). The same ambiguous Montreal also appears in Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y.: “a homosexual and Québécois saga, Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. names neither homosexuality nor Quebec” (Blanchard, 2009, 101).10 Beyond the narrative focus on border-crossing, regional identities, and multilingualism, Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s US-set films also reveal a number of aesthetic and stylistic qualities that they themselves have credited to their Quebec backgrounds. Vallée in particular was known

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for his penchant for working with lower budgets, less CGI, and fewer production stages or props than his US contemporaries. When asked why the Dallas Buyers Club project had remained with the studio for so long before he picked it up, Vallée responded: “It’s always complex and complicated to make a film in Hollywood with a studio, and they tried to make it with a lot of money, and it’s long, it’s complex, so we tried to make it with not a studio [sic], with not a lot of money.” He shot the film with all natural lighting, on location, in twenty-five days. (in Dean, 2013)

Vallée himself and journalists have interpreted his minimalist approach to prestigious Hollywood projects such as Dallas Buyers Club and Wild as a legacy of the Québécois cinéma direct. This filmmaking tradition is characteristic of Quiet Revolution-era Quebec and influenced by the French Nouvelle vague, favoring natural lighting, pared-back production values, and reliance on location rather than studio sets (Bachand, 2019, 155). A Drew Hunt interview with Vallée for his 2015 film Demolition stresses the contrast between Vallée’s “natural” approach and conventional Hollywood technique: “Demolition, like its immediate predecessors, was shot digitally and off the cuff with an eye for cinema vérité. Think available light, handheld camerawork, and fully dynamic 360-degree space.” Hunt admired Vallée for only preparing one set for a dramatic demolition scene: “It’s obvious that there aren’t any tricks involved. Those are real sledgehammers flattening real walls, and Vallée’s camera is within striking distance of the action” (2016). Villeneuve has also credited the Québécois filmmaking tradition with differentiating his approach from other Hollywood directors. Even in the CGI-heavy projects that distance him from the minimalist Vallée, Villeneuve has acknowledged his “art-house” Quebec heritage and its impact on his studio work. Of Blade Runner 2049, he confessed “we’ve just made the most expensive art house movie in cinema history” (in Sharf, 2018). Indeed, Villeneuve in particular has spoken on many occasions of how his Québécois upbringing and identity have influenced his American filmmaking, and reiterated that his US projects do not take him away from his Québécois roots, but reaffirm them through his experiences with other countries and cultures. In an interview with T’Cha Dunlevy (2017) he explained how he drew on Quebec winters as he built the noir landscapes for the dystopian 2040s Los Angeles of Blade Runner 2049. And in his “Anatomy of a Scene” interview with the New York Times for the Pennsylvania-set Prisoners, he described how the mise-en-scène

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Fig. 7.2: Blade Runner 2049

for a pivotal scene was inspired by the moment a Montreal rain becomes a snowfall: “As the scene will move forward later, the rain will turn into snow. I inspired myself a lot from my home town Montreal for the weather, for the climate” (Villeneuve, 2013). Finally, despite majority US settings, little French dialogue, and mostly Hollywood stars, both Vallée and Villeneuve have employed Québécois crew members and filming locations for many of their projects, and Villeneuve continues to do so. Arrival was filmed in Montreal and Vallée’s HBO series Sharp Objects and Big Little Lies feature mostly Québécois crew (notwithstanding high high-profile collaborations with US producers like Reese Witherspoon). Several years before his death, Vallée expressed a desire to make more films in Montreal, and Villeneuve has stated more emphatically: “My home is Montreal. I will stay in Montreal and continue to make movies in Montreal” (in Monk, 2014). Bachand takes the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wild as an example of Vallée’s continued connection to Quebec film: Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild (2014) is a film funded by American interests, filmed in the United States with a Hollywood star, Reese Witherspoon, headlining an entirely American distribution. It was thus perceived as an American film. Its transnational character, however, can still be seen in the participation of Québécois crew and the cultural and stylistic mark of its auteur. (2019, 153)11

It is perhaps unproductive to attempt to situate Jean-Marc Vallée’s and Denis Villeneuve’s films in either Montreal or Los Angeles, or any of the myriad other locations in which they are set and made. Instead, it is helpful to turn to the ways in which they have characterized themselves

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as both Québécois and more broadly “North American.” In her article on Sicario, Hilaria Loyo analyzes a press conference Villeneuve gave with his cast at the Cannes Film Festival. Villeneuve stated that “[Sicario] is not about Mexico […] The movie is about America,” and he explained that he wanted to offer “the American point of view” because as “a North American [he] shared the responsibility for that violence” (2019, 61). Here, Villeneuve mistakenly uses the term “North American” to refer only to the US and Canada, contrasting Mexico with “North America” despite Mexico also being a part of that continent. However, Villeneuve’s use of this terminology to describe his own identity reveals the extent to which he sees himself not so much as a Québécois filmmaker working in Hollywood, but as a member of a transnational North American community. Such a perspective proves helpful when considering his cinema, which both thematizes and transcends national borders and identities. Conclusions Hollywood is often positioned as an industrial, artistic, and philosophical opposite to Quebec, or even to an overly general “world” art-house cinema. Yet the overlapping and interconnected Quebec-Hollywood cinemas of Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve provide an alternative to narratives of monolingual Hollywood hegemony. In many ways, Vallée and Villeneuve share a career trajectory that appears to move from low-budget, French-language, Montreal-based films to big-budget, English-language, Hollywood-based ones. Yet they maintain important aesthetic, production, and narrative connections to Quebec cinema throughout their work. Instead of reading their careers as linear journeys from Montreal to Los Angeles, this chapter traces the regional, national, and transnational contours of Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s cinemas in centripetal and centrifugal patterns. Without ignoring the commercial dominance or cultural hegemony of the Hollywood system, it imagines Hollywood not as a force which eclipses all others, but as one of multiple North American filmmaking centers in which transnational influences are increasingly prevalent. At the same time, it views Quebec cinema as particularly and profoundly diverse, both a magnetic center for transcultural filmmaking (i.e. a centripetal impulse) and the origin site of a border-crossing mentality that radiates outwards into other national filmmaking spaces (i.e. a centrifugal one).

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The disempowered narrative—so popular in journalistic coverage of Jean-Marc Vallée’s and Denis Villeneuve’s careers—of provincial Québécois directors swallowed up by Hollywood is not helpful to us here. Perhaps this is a story of the globalization of Quebec cinema, of the Québécois penetration of Hollywood cinema, or of the emergence of a transnational, multilingual, North American filmmaking landscape. Such a landscape both transcends US and Canadian (as well as Mexican) borders and reaffirms regional specificities. These films are set in the rural US, US-Mexico border towns, Civil War-era Lebanon, university campuses in Toronto and Montreal, pastoral Quebec, Victorian England, the Pacific Northwest, a dystopian future Los Angeles, the fantastical planet of Arrakis, and modern-day Paris, Montreal, and New York. No matter their explicit connection to other nations, Villeneuve’s and Vallée’s films are hybrid and transnational, informed by the inherent, profound diversity at the heart of Quebec film. Works Cited Bachand, Denis. “Du national au transnational: l’empreinte documentaire dans les films de Denis Villeneuve, Philippe Falardeau et Kim Nguyen.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 151–166. Baillargeon, Mercédès and Bertrand, Karine. “Introduction: le transnationalisme du cinéma et des (nouveaux) médias: le contexte québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 137–150. Bertrand, Karine. “Le cinéma autochtone au Québec: de la représentation à la reappropriation.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 221–240. Blanchard, Maxime. “Le Québec libre: C.R.A.Z.Y. de Jean-Marc Vallée.” French Forum 34.3 (2009): 101–119. Carruthers, Lee. “An Equivocal Auteur: Gauging Style and Substance in the Films of Denis Villeneuve.” Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 42–66. Chitwood, Adam. “‘Blade Runner 2’: Denis Villeneuve Talks ‘Autonomous’ Follow-Up, Harrison Ford, and More.” Collider (11 September 2015). https://collider.com/blade-runner-2-director-denis-villeneuve-talks-scifi-sequel-harrison-ford. Dean, Michelle. “Flavorwire Interview: ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ and ‘Wild’ Director Jean-Marc Vallée.” Flavorwire (2 November 2013). https:// www.flavorwire.com/423069/flavorwire-interview-dallas-buyers-cluband-wild-director-jean-marc-vallee.

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Douglas, Edward. “Interview: Director Denis Villeneuve Takes No Prisoners.” Coming Soon (18 September 2013). https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/ features/108949-interview-director-denis-villeneuve-takes-no-prisoners. Dunlevy, T’Cha. “Denis Villeneuve on the Cutting Edge.” Montreal Gazette (1 October 2017). https://montrealgazette.com/feature/denis-villeneuveon-the-cutting-edge. Fernandez, Maria Elena. “Jean-Marc Vallée on Why Sharp Objects Ended with a Shock.” Vulture (26 August 2018). https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/ sharp-objects-finale-jean-marc-vallee-interview.html. Gallego, Carlos. “‘Juarez, the Beast’: States of Fantasy and the Transnational City in Sicario.” Arizona Quarterly 74.1 (2018): 45–72. Heinrich, Jeff. “Denis Villeneuve: Sicario Is a Very Dark Film, a Dark Poem, Quite Violent.” Guardian (24 April 2015). https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2015/apr/24/denis-villeneuve-sicario-cannes-2015. Hertz, Barry. “Jean-Marc Vallée: Film’s Redemption Man.” Maclean’s (15 September 2014). https://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/jean-marcvallee-films-redemption-man/. Hunt, Drew. “Appetite for Deconstruction: Jean-Marc Vallée and Jake Gyllenhaal Talk Demolition.” Movie Maker (11 April 2016). https:// www.moviemaker.com/jean-marc-vallee-jake-gyllenhaal-demolition/. Kotte, Claudia. “Zero Degrees of Separation: Post-Exilic Return in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies.” Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema. Ed. Rebecca Prime. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 287–302. Loyo, Hilaria. “The Politics of Space within the Mexico–US Border Region: The War on Drugs and Geographies of Violence in Sicario (2015).” The Velvet Light Trap 83 (2019): 60–72. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. ——. “Worlds within: In the World.” Cinéma-monde: Decentring Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Eds. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 323–335. Monk, Katherine. “Villeneuve Talks Language, Therapy and Hollywood.” Ottawa Citizen 39 (14 March 2014). https://www.pressreader.com/ canada/ottawa-citizen/20140314/page/39. Mottram, James. “Sicario Director Denis Villeneuve: Charting His Amazing Rise from the Canadian Arthouse to Blade Runner 2.” Independent (18 September 2015). https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ films/features/sicaro-director-denis-villeneuve-interview-charting-hisamazing-rise-from-the-canadian-arthouse-to-10508283.html. Robinson, Ian. “Speaking across Borders: Xavier Dolan and the Transnationalism of Contemporary Auteur Cinema in Quebec.” Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. 24–41.

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Schilt, Thibaut. “An Ostrich, a Backhoe and a Few Ski-Doos: Tracking the Road Movie in Quebec and Beyond.” Cinéma-monde: Decentring Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Eds. Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 192–215. Sharf, Zack. “Denis Villeneuve Knows He Won’t Be Able to Make a Movie Like ‘Blade Runner 2049’ Again: ‘We Made a Monster.’” Indiewire (6 February 2018). https://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/ denis-villeneuve-blade-runner-2049-wont-do-it-again-1201925567/. Villeneuve, Denis. “Anatomy of a Scene: Prisoners.” New York Times (20 September 2013). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCYRAH 0jQH4. ——. “Conférence de presse: Sicario.” Festival de Cannes (19 May 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reGsOqR2LDA.

Filmography Bensaddek, Bachir, dir. Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City), 2016. Dolan, Xavier, dir. Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World), 2016. ——. Mommy, 2014. Falardeau, Philippe, dir. Monsieur Lazhar, 2011. Leriche, Chloé, dir. Avant les rues (Before the Streets), 2016. Lesage, Philippe, dir. Genèse (Genesis), 2018. Lioret, Philippe, dir. Le Fils de Jean (A Kid), 2016. Obomsawin, Alanis, dir. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, 1993. Scott, Ridley, dir. Blade Runner, 1982. Sioui Durand, Yves, dir. Mesnak, 2011. Vallée, Jean-Marc, dir. Big Little Lies, HBO, 2017. ——. C.R.A.Z.Y. 2005. ——. Café de Flore, 2011. ——. Dallas Buyers Club, 2013. ——. Demolition, 2015. ——. Liste noire (Black List), 1995. ——. Sharp Objects, HBO, 2018. ——. The Young Victoria, 2009. ——. Wild, 2014. Villeneuve, Denis, dir. Arrival, 2016. ——. Bladerunner 2049, 2017. ——. Cleopatra, forthcoming (as of 2021). ——. Dune, 2021. ——. Dune: Part Two, forthcoming 2024.

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——. Enemy, 2013. ——. Incendies, 2010. ——. Maëlstrom (Maelstrom), 2000. ——. Prisoners, 2013. ——. Sicario, 2015. ——. Un 32 août sur terre (August 32nd on Earth), 1998.

Appendix 1 Language and coproduction data, Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve Jean-Marc Vallée, director Project

Year

Production Countries

Settings

Filming Locations

Sharp Objects

2018

US

Missouri

California, English Georgia

Big Little Lies

2017

US

California

California

English

Demolition

2015

US

New York

New York

English

Wild

2014

US

California, California, English Oregon Oregon

Dallas Buyers Club

2013

US

Texas

Louisiana

English, Japanese

Café de Flore

2011

Canada, France

Montreal, Paris

Montreal, Paris

English, French

The Young Victoria

2009

UK, US

England

England

English, German

C.R.A.Z.Y.

2005

Canada, Morocco

Montreal

Essaouira, Montreal

English, French, German, Polish, Spanish

Let There 2000 Be Light and Southern Comfort (The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne)

Canada, UK Atlantic Montreal Ocean, US

Languages

English

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Project

Year

Production Countries

Settings

Filming Locations

Languages

Loser Love

1999

Canada

New York

New York

English

Les mots magiques (Magical Words)

1998

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

Los Locos (Los Locos: Posse Rides Again)

1997

Canada

Arizona

Arizona

English

Leave (Strangers)

1996

France

Paris

Paris

English, French

Les fleurs 1996 magiques (Magical Flowers)

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

Liste noire (Black List)

1995

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

Stéréotypes (Stereotypes)

1992

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

Filming Locations

Languages

Denis Villeneuve, director Project

Year

Production Countries

Settings

Dune

2021

Canada, US Fictional planets

Austria, Canada, Hungary, Jordan, Norway, Slovakia, UAE

English, fictional languages

Blade Runner 2049

2017

Canada, Hungary, Mexico, Spain, UK, US

Hungary, Mexico, Spain, US

English, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, Somali, Spanish

California

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Project

Year

Production Countries

Arrival

2016

Sicario

Settings

Filming Locations

Languages

Canada, US Montana

Quebec

English, Heptapod (invented extraterrestrial language), Mandarin, Russian

2015

Hong Northwest Kong, Mexico, Mexico, US SouthWwest US

Northwest Mexico, Southwest US

English, Spanish

Enemy

2013

Canada, France, Spain

Toronto

Toronto

English

Prisoners

2013

US

Pennsylvania Georgia

English

Incendies

2010

Canada, France

Lebanon, Montreal

Jordan, Montreal

Arabic, English, French

Polytechnique

2009

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

Next Floor

2008

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

English

Un cri au bonheur 2007 (Happiness Bound)

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

French

120 Seconds to Get Elected (The Art of Seduction)

2006

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

English

Maëlstrom (Maelstrom)

2000

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

English, French, Norwegian

Un 32 août sur terre (August 32nd on Earth)

1998

Canada

Montreal

Montreal, Utah

English, French

Le Technétium (Cosmos)

1996

Canada

Montreal

Montreal

English, French

RER FFWD

1994

Canada

Kingston

Kingston

English, French

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Notes 1. Original French: “où les expressions locales et nationales ne sont pas perdues dans le maelström de la globalisation, mais s’y forgent une place et y sont transmises.” All translations from French to English are my own. 2. Others who should be mentioned here include Philippe Falardeau and Kim Nguyen. Although Falardeau has also become a frequent MontrealHollywood collaborator, he has so far targeted a more independent filmmaking sector, whereas Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s US-based films and series are usually associated with large budgets and major studios. Nguyen has increasingly turned towards films and series primarily in English but still made within the Canadian industry (often as international coproductions). 3. See Appendix 1 for complete data on transnational coproduction partners, settings, filming locations, and languages in Vallée’s and Villeneuve’s work. 4. Original French: “Infiltré de toutes parts par des courants culturels transnationaux, le cinéma Québécois s’inscrit dans une démarche d’ouverture à l’Autre qui le transforme tout en assurant le développement de sa spécificité.” 5. For French-language statistics from the Canadian government, see https:// www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016011/98200-x2016011-fra.cfm. 6. See Carruthers (2023) for an in-depth critique of the widespread tendency to read Denis Villeneuve’s work through an auteurist lens. 7. Original French: “la réception des films d’origine nationale se voit assujettie à une évaluation fortement indexée sur ces modes d’expression dominants, voir hégémoniques.” 8. See Michael Gott’s chapter in this volume for a more detailed discussion of Bensaddek’s film. 9. See http://www.wapikoni.ca/home for details of the Wapikoni Mobile project. See the chapter “The Indigenous Other” in Marshall (2001, 239–262) for a detailed study of these important collaborative filmmaking traditions up to the end of the 20th century, and Bertrand (2019) for a 21st century study of this growing corpus. In this volume, see Chapter 1 by Michael Gott, Chapter 2 by Karine Bertrand, Chapter 4 by Julie-Françoise Tolliver, and Chapter 6 by Bill Marshall for additional discussions of Indigenous films and representation of Indigenous subjects. 10. Original French: “Saga Québécoise et homosexuelle, C.R.A.Z.Y. de Jean-Marc Vallée ne nomme ni le Québec ni l’homosexualité.” 11. Original French: “Wild de Jean-Marc Vallée (2014) est un film financé par des intérêts américains, tourné aux États-Unis avec une vedette hollywoodienne, Reese Witherspoon en tête d’affiche d’une distribution entièrement américaine. Il est de ce fait perçu à sa réception comme un film américain. Son caractère transnational peut toutefois se voir caractérisé par la participation de techniciens Québécois et par l’empreinte stylistique et culturelle de son auteur.”

chapter eight

Denis Côté on the Road from Radisson to Locarno Thibaut Schilt Denis Côté on the Road from Radisson to Locarno

This chapter focuses on the reception—and perception—of Denis Côté’s cinema in Quebec, anglophone Canada, and other parts of the world. Following the release in 2005 of his low-budget, digitally filmed Les états nordiques (Drifting States), the horror film lover turned accidental film critic launched his career as an innovative, fiercely independent director, received his first prize at the Locarno Film Festival, and quickly became one of the key figures of what came to be known as the renouveau du cinéma québécois, or Quebec New Wave. In this first feature, the male protagonist drives 800 miles north from Montreal to Radisson after (illicitly) euthanizing his terminally ill mother and attempts to start a new life in a town situated “at the end of the world” (Gajan, 2015), near a major hydroelectric power station in the James Bay region of Quebec.1 The story, which begins as fictional but progressively turns into a documentary about the isolated (settler) inhabitants of Radisson, already exhibits the director’s signature hybrid style that commentators have described as an ambiguous and tone-shifting cinema of the “in-between,” combining elements of both documentary and fiction (Fradet, 2016; Gajan, 2015). This début film was made with the intention of going directly against, in Côté’s words, “a cozy type of heritage cinema” (“un cinéma de patrimoine confortable”; Gajan, 2015), the highly polished period dramas of which the Quebec box office hit Séraphin: un homme et son péché (Séraphin: Heart of Stone, Charles Binamé, 2002) is a prime example.  Since Les états nordiques, Côté has released a handful of shorts and thirteen additional feature films (both “fiction” and “documentary,” made with radically different budgets), and has continued to present his work at various international festivals, winning more prizes in

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Fig. 8.1: Les états nordiques

Locarno (for Elle veut le chaos/All That She Wants in 2008 and Curling in 2010), Berlin (for Vic + Flo ont vu un ours/Vic + Flo Saw a Bear in 2013 and Hygiène sociale/Social Hygiene in 2021), and elsewhere, including in South Korea, Uruguay, the United States, and his native New Brunswick. These accolades were relayed and amplified by critics—especially in Quebec, Ontario, and, notably, in France’s Cahiers du cinéma—and spawned numerous retrospectives of his fast-growing oeuvre, both in Canada (Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver) and around the world (La Rochelle, Namur, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Prague, among others). However, contrary to his fellow Québécois auteur Xavier Dolan, who has enjoyed tremendous success at Cannes and whose films are widely distributed, watched, and commented upon, Côté’s work has not enjoyed the same level of enthusiasm from either Québécois viewers (in 2015, the director claimed to have more spectators in Buenos Aires than in Montreal), the Quebec film establishment (he has won no Jutra/Iris awards to date), or international distributors (several of his feature films remain unavailable outside of Canada). This comparative lack of wide distribution and recognition will be addressed in this chapter, which begins with a consideration of Côté’s output within the renouveau trend, continues with an overview of the various ways that his cinema “travels” internationally, and ends with a discussion of its uneven appreciation within Quebec’s borders.

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Denis Côté and Quebec’s renouveau Since the release of Les états nordiques and as Côté’s career was taking shape in the most unusual ways, Canadian critics quickly noticed that there was nothing ordinary about his cinema. His entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia describes him as an “uncompromising and prolific maverick” who “writes, directs, and produces distinctive films that are starkly minimalist, strangely poetic, dryly funny and thematically enigmatic” with a “deadpan style and marginalized characters [which] have earned him an international reputation as one of Canada’s leading auteurs” (Alioff, 2014). In 2009, Côté was deemed “certainly the most experimental” director working in Quebec today (Hamel, 2009, 47). During a 2010 interview for the release of his winter drama Curling, arguably his first “accessible” film after his unsuccessful second feature Elle veut le chaos and the docufiction Carcasses (2009), the Québécois film magazine Séquences introduced Côté as an “enfant terrible” whose style disrupted “the often well-behaved milieu of Quebec cinema” and challenged the spectator with films that are aesthetically ambitious, demanding, raw, and indelibly mysterious (Gnaba, 2010). Looking back on Côté’s career to date in an essay published in 2023, film scholar and Côté admirer Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan contends that “His films have always oscillated between an awareness of a situated reality borrowed from the aesthetics of Direct Cinema, and the cinematographic forms that put him into the context of independent international cinema” (2023, 104–105). Despite numerous comments about Côté’s individualism and nonpareil cinematic approach, he also became associated, perhaps paradoxically, with a new “movement” emerging in the mid-2000s, the renouveau du cinéma québécois. In fact, Côté was described as the “chef de file” [leader] (Lavallée, 2010b), and, along with Maxime Giroux, Rafaël Ouellet, and Stéphane Lafleur, as part of the “noyau dur” [core group] (Dequen et al., 2011, 15) of this unofficial collective, which anglophone critics such as Patricia Bailey have named the Quebec New Wave. Characterized by “suburban ennui, substance abuse, and suicide” and featuring characters who speak French but “whose experiences as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers,” the films present slow-moving and austere stories from which “[q]uestions of language and nation are conspicuously absent” (Bailey, 2010). Unlike the previous generation, Bailey further remarks, many of these filmmakers came of age after the separatist referendum defeat in

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1995, a period when “the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless,” which may explain their apparent indifference to issues surrounding Québécois identity. During a roundtable discussion held in 2011, which was later published in the journals 24 images and Nouvelles vues, critics in Quebec famously debated and defined the characteristics of this new trend, which in addition to the “core group” mentioned above includes films by Sophie Deraspe, Anne Émond, Myriam Verreault, Xavier Dolan, Sébastien Pilote, and Simon Lavoie (Dequen et al., 2011; Dequen, 2011). Among the participants in this conversation was Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, who a year earlier had published in France’s Cahiers du cinéma an article on the renouveau, which he then called “mouvance” or “mouvée,” and which he described as the most dynamic trend emerging in Quebec since the 1960s (and the work of Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle, Pierre Perrault, Gilles Groulx, and other contributors to cinéma direct). Sirois-Trahan remarked that the recent films in question were made by relatively young directors who often knew each other and “have in common a few strong themes (the suburbs and the countryside, a taste for banality and an awareness of the inevitability of things, a certain cruelty, etc.), and several aesthetic affinities, starting with a preference for long takes and static frames” (2010, 76). A significant portion of Sirois-Trahan’s Cahiers article is dedicated to Côté’s cinema, which he defends against critics who find it vain and vacuous and instead defines it as preoccupied with the concept of “impossible community” in a series of films that “pose eminently political questions” (2010, 76) such as the place of people and the value of things in today’s society. Contrary to Xavier Dolan, considered a “UFO” (Dequen et al., 2011, 15) in Quebec’s contemporary film landscape despite some initial preoccupations shared with other young filmmakers, the crucial place that Côté’s films occupy in the roundtable discussion confirms his importance within the renouveau trend, as he shares with other directors a fixation on the literal or figurative entrapment of their protagonists (Dequen et al., 2011, 18).2 Côté’s association with a certain tendency of Québécois cinema that is much more auteurist than commercial contrasts with the type of cinephilia that initially led him to become interested in the profession. Born on November 16, 1973 in Perth-Andover, New Brunswick before moving to the Montreal suburb of Longueil as a young child, Denis Côté grew up watching countless horror films in his parents’ basement. Later, he studied cinema at Collège Ahuntsic (though he also describes himself as “autodidacte” [self-taught]; Gajan, 2015) and founded the production

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company nihilproductions in 1994. He made several shorts at the same time as he was beginning to work as a famously acerbic film critic (by accident and with no prior training, according to him), first on the radio and then for the free weekly magazine Ici Montréal between 1999 and 2005. It is also during this period that he became vice-president of the Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma (AQCC; Messiant, 2012; Alioff, 2014). In interviews, Côté has discussed his early experiences as a film watcher as well as his lack of formal film education, and has blamed the unimaginative scripts of his first feature films (which he calls “scénarios faibles” [weak screenplays] and, in the case of Elle veut le chaos, “scénario à trous” [screenplay full of holes]; though Les états nordiques had no script at all) on his longstanding passion for horror films, whose predictable plots arguably did not adequately prepare him to devise narrative films with well-crafted storylines (Gajan, 2015; Frodon, 2011). Far from being detrimental to his creativity, these limited plots became Côté’s marque de fabrique (not unlike certain 1960s directors involved in the French New Wave and Quebec’s cinéma direct) and contributed to the establishment of his trademark style, which international festival juries found especially appealing but which also turned him into an “auteur maudit” in the eyes of the Quebec film establishment (“Nobody called me to make commercials,” Côté ironized ten years into his career; Gajan, 2015). Let us take three examples from Côté’s early filmography to illustrate his eclectic (and for some, disconcerting) directing choices, all of which share an observational, and ultimately equivocal, approach to filmmaking. Following the success of Les états nordiques at Locarno, Côté followed up with an equally low-budget but even bolder project, Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives, 2007), shot in Bulgarian, a language he does not understand, and shown at the same Swiss festival two years later. This intimate drama/thriller, which Côté described as an “arrogant move” (Dequen, 2009–2010) and a “caprice” (Gajan, 2015) meant to challenge himself to focus on other aspects of directing besides dialogues, follows two Bulgarian immigrants (a couple in real life) who meet online, lock themselves into a cabin in the Quebec woods in order to become acquainted with each other, and are later stalked by something unseen in the wilderness. Carcasses, which premiered at Cannes in 2009, first documents the real life of an introverted man who runs a “car cemetery” in a small Quebec town before turning into a fiction film about a group of youngsters with Down syndrome who live near the protagonist’s junkyard. In 2012 came Bestiaire, a

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Fig. 8.2: Carcasses

dialogue-free documentary that presents, in long static shots, a variety of wild animals (and their human caretakers) from Parc Safari, a large rural zoo in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, near the Quebec-New York border. The minimalist mise-en-scène arguably forces the spectator to find “meaning” in these portraits and in the onscreen animal-human interactions but ultimately does not offer any answers. The documentary received much attention at home and abroad, as it was shown at various festivals around the world, including Sundance and the Berlinale, and is one of Côté’s three films to date (along with Curling and Vic + Flo ont vu un ours) to have received Jutra/Iris nominations (with no win). Although Côté’s cinema has been compared to that of other international auteurs such as the Argentine Lisandro Alonso and the Catalan Albert Serra (Dequen, 2011), he is most often associated with the work of his fellow contemporary Québécois auteurs, particularly Stéphane Lafleur. According to the Quebec film scholar Germain Lacasse, Côté and Lafleur are the boldest of all renouveau filmmakers, as they tend to “cast a rather hard look at their world but refuse to soften it with an attractive aesthetics; their form is as rough as their discourse” (Dequen et al., 2011). Côté himself, despite objecting to the renouveau label as a way for critics to “irritate us and put us in a box” (Dequen, 2009–2010),

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acknowledges commonalities between him and others, including his friend and early collaborator Raphaël Ouellet: an often intense cinephilia; their frequent participation (as spectators) in Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma; their early lives in the suburbs or in small towns, which they often prefer over urban settings in their films; and, more generally, a tendency to incorporate their “cultural baggage” (Dequen, 2009–2010) into their work. Despite these shared attributes, Côté’s fifteen-year career does stand out from that of his Québécois contemporaries in his deliberate and consistent tendency to alternate between what he describes as “accidental films,” generally made quickly with little to no script, a limited budget, and no stars, and his “big films,” made with outside producers with a detailed script, a bigger budget, some famous actors, and no opportunity to improvise (Messiant, 2012). Even though he claims to be satisfied with all his films, Côté finds the former category (which includes Les états nordiques, Nos vies privées, Bestiaire, Que ta joie demeure [Joy of Man’s Desiring, 2014], and Carcasses, his personal favorite which “stays alive” even after 200 viewings) to be films made for the love of cinema and the latter category, which includes Elle veut le chaos, Curling, and Vic + Flo ont vu un ours, to be “dead films” because they were made with the intention of being more accessible and more commercially successful (Messiant, 2012; Fradet, 2016). Despite this distinction, the Côté trademark draws films from both categories into festivals and places his cinema at the forefront of Canadian filmmaking: Carcasses, Curling, and Vic + Flo ont vu un ours all made Canada’s Top Ten list of feature films in their respective years by the Toronto International Film Festival. “I’m a film festival guy,” says Côté: “I have to admit it. If the film can do the usual 30 film festivals in a year, for me, it’s okay” (Alioff, 2014). Our next section will consider the lives of Côté’s films at international festivals and retrospectives. Festival Successes and International Retrospectives In an interview given in Montreal six films into his career, Denis Côté stated his personal detachment from Quebec society and emphasized the greater success of his work outside the province’s borders: “I don’t feel much admiration for Quebec in general. All my films have been seen much more outside. I’m not very attached to this society. I’m not even a very good citizen […] I’m not a very politically engaged person.

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And then, you see it in my films, too, I try to extricate myself from any society” (Messiant, 2012). As mentioned earlier, Côté’s international success started at the Locarno Film Festival, where he presented his first three films as well as Curling, his fifth, and where he received four major awards. He also developed an early connection with South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival, from which he received the Woosuk “Indie Vision” Award for Les états nordiques. The same festival’s Digital Project later funded and screened Côté’s short film Les lignes ennemies (Enemy Lines, 2010), which follows the mysterious expedition of six armed men through the Quebec countryside (Nicoud, 2009). As his reputation and portfolio grew, Côté accepted invitations from top international festivals, including Cannes, Sundance, and Berlin, where the tragicomic lesbian romance thriller and appropriately titled Vic + Flo ont vu un ours received the Silver Bear/Alfred Bauer Prize dedicated to films that “open new perspectives on cinematic art” (Chahine, 2019, 41). Comparisons between Côté and Xavier Dolan have been made, especially as both Québécois directors gained recognition at festivals and even presented their work the same year at Cannes, where Carcasses and Dolan’s acclaimed début J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) premiered in 2009. These comparisons usually point out a difference in perception and success between the two: “while Côté’s robust festival career has certainly endowed him with a solid ‘auteur’ status in the cinephile milieu, it has not translated into a global outreach of Dolan’s magnitude. Part of the reason may lie in the relative ascetism of his works, which makes for a more ‘intellectual’ and less catchy kind of cinema” (Chahine, 2019, 41). Côté’s singular, offbeat, and minimalist style is precisely what appeals to festival juries and prominent critics outside of Quebec. Jean-Michel Frodon, for instance, included the commercially unsuccessful black-andwhite contemporary “Western” Elle veut le chaos (winner of two prizes at Locarno, including the Silver Leopard) in his top ten films of the year 2008 when he was editor-in-chief at Cahiers du cinéma, and interviewed the director ahead of the release of Carcasses in France (Frodon, 2009).3 When the Fema La Rochelle film festival paid tribute to Côté’s career and screened his first five full-length films as part of its 2011 edition, the same French critic reiterated his admiration for the filmmaker, defended him against people who found his cinema “difficult” and “austere” (claiming it was just the opposite), and took a direct jab at Québécois critics: “Ever since his first feature film, Denis Côté’s cinema has been met with a certain perplexity, if not rejection, from critics at home. Certainly, if their criterion for excellence is Denys Arcand, then […] we are very far from it! [The two

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Fig. 8.3: Curling

directors] live not on opposite sides of the world, but on different planets” (Frodon, 2011). Côté’s positive reception on Metropolitan French soil culminated in the year 2015, when France’s Ministry of Culture named him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to the art of cinema. To illustrate the globetrotting nature of Côté’s films (and of the director himself), let us focus on the years 2010 and 2011 and take as a case study his fifth feature, Curling, which marks a turning point in his career as a film that was apparently “better understood” by viewers and critics than his previous work and managed to find an audience outside the festival circle (Curling is also, arguably, closer in atmosphere and spirit to other renouveau films, especially Lafleur’s). This intimate drama, which received Quebec’s Prix Luc-Perreault-AQCC for best film of the year 2010, is set in snowy rural Quebec and focuses on the complex and evolving relationship between a protective single father and his sheltered twelve-year-old daughter. After premiering in Locarno and winning two awards there (for best director and best actor for Emmanuel Bilodeau, who plays the father), Curling was shown at more than thirty additional festivals on multiple continents, including Rio de Janeiro, Oslo, Montreal, Rotterdam, Gothenburg, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Bern, Jeonju, St. Petersburg. and Buenos Aires (Breuque, 2011). In addition, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art scheduled the US premiere of Curling as part of its longstanding New Directors/ New Films selection in 2011 (despite the fact that Côté was not exactly a “new” director then) and the film was nominated for a Lumière Award

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in France in the best French-language film category the following year. In parallel, the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Vienna, and La Rochelle offered complete retrospectives of Côté’s work. As for the director, he was invited to be part of the international juries of the Lisbon Film Festival and Poland’s Wroclaw Film Festival during the same period. Such international success and recognition gave Curling (which had already obtained three Jutra nominations in 2011 for best film, best director, and best actor) an additional Jutra nod (but no win) the following year under the category “Film s’étant le plus illustré à l’extérieur du Québec” [Most successful film outside Quebec]. Interestingly, Côté was nominated in this particular Jutra category for three consecutive years, always losing to more mainstream and more commercially successful films: in 2012, Curling lost against Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated Incendies; in 2013, Bestiaire lost to Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, also nominated for an Academy Award; and in 2014, it was Vic + Flo’s turn to lose against Louise Archambault’s Gabrielle. Six years later, in 2020, Côté’s fantasy film Répertoire des villes disparues (Ghost Town Anthology) lost in the same category (the Prix Jutra changed its name to Prix Iris in 2016) against Matthias & Maxime, despite the latter being one of Xavier Dolan’s least successful films to date. Going back to Curling, it is worth pointing out that the success of the film on the international scene and its two Jutra nominations at home did not translate into greater recognition for the director at the national (Canadian) level. The Toronto-based Canadian Screen Awards (formerly known as the Genie Awards, until 2013) ignored Curling despite routinely nominating and giving prizes to a significant number of independent Quebec films: between 2013 and 2022, seven out of ten recipients of the “Best Motion Picture” award went to films that were shot in Quebec or made by Quebec-based directors, six of which are primarily in French, and two of which were directed by Xavier Dolan.4 Over the course of Côté’s career to date, the only Genie/Canadian Screen Award nomination the director has received was in 2020 for Répertoire des villes disparues in the “Best Adapted Screenplay” category, which he lost to Sophie Desraspe’s Antigone (Larissa Corriveau, who appears in Côté’s film, was also nominated in the “Best Supporting Actress” category). Although Répertoire des villes disparues may on the surface appear to be a second turning point (after Curling) in Côté’s career, with its more visible local advertising and media attention and its ten Iris and two Canadian Screen Awards nominations, this increased success and wider overall recognition had arguably more to do with the film’s

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genre—mystery and supernatural films, including ghost stories, have multiplied on Quebec screens in the past few years and delight local audiences—than with what we may refer to as the “Côté brand” or the “Côté touch.” Since the release of Curling, Côté has continued to alternate between low- and big-budget productions and, although he has maintained a relationship with Locarno (where his two “accidental films,” the documentary on extreme bodybuilding Ta peau si lisse/A Skin So Soft and Wilcox, a fiction/documentary hybrid about a lone rural drifter, premiered in 2017 and 2019 respectively), most of his post-Bestiaire work has been shown at the Berlinale instead: Vic + Flo in 2013; the documentary on working-class Québécois’ relationship with work Que ta joie demeure in 2013; the (melo)drama about a heterosexual cisgender man in crisis Boris sans Béatrice/Boris without Beatrice in 2016; Répertoire des villes disparues in 2019; the microbudget period dramedy with unintentional social distancing Hygiène sociale/Social Hygiene in 2021 (best director award); and, most recently, his fourteenth feature film Un été comme ça/That Kind of Summer, about three women exploring their sexuality over the course of a summer in the Quebec countryside, in 2022. Meanwhile, retrospectives of his work in various venues and formats have continued, including a comprehensive program at Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts over the course of two months in September and October 2014 (which included a screening of all his films as well as one of Côté’s biggest inspirations, Werner Herzog’s 1970 Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen/Even Dwarfs Started Small); a virtual retrospective of Bestiaire, Vic + Flo, and Boris sans Béatrice on the US streaming service for classic and international films The Criterion Channel in August 2021; and a presentation of three recent films (Répertoire des villes disparues, Wilcox, and Hygiène sociale) in Côté’s presence at an independent theater in Warsaw, Poland in July 2022. If Côté’s talent is not unanimously recognized within Quebec, as we have seen, he has been described as the “cinéaste chouchou” [darling] of the Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie, held annually in his native New Brunswick, where most of his films have been shown and three received prizes in the best documentary (Bestiaire) and best Canadian feature (Elle veut le chaos and Vic + Flo) categories (Mousseau, 2021). In more recent years, Côté’s films have continued to be screened at international venues, both familiar and new. For example, after showing at the Berlinale, Hygiène sociale won the best director award at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival and Répertoire des villes

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disparues went on to win prizes at The Sea Festival in Vlissingen, the Netherlands, Montvideo’s Uruguay International Film festival, and Russia’s Arkhangelsk Arctic Open Film Festival. These accolades from both francophone and non-francophone (as well as non-Western) regions illustrate Côté’s ability to tell stories with universal appeal, despite the fact that, so far, all of his films have been set firmly within Quebec’s borders. However, ever since the beginning of his career, his success worldwide has always been accompanied by disgruntled critics and frustrated viewers. The director appears to relish this lack of consensus: “There are always three or four spectators who walk out of the theater during one of my movies. That’s fine with me; I’m even proud of that. I refuse to make consensual films for every public and see 400 people all standing up at the end, people who all cried and clapped at the same time. I find that suspect. I don’t accept that, I don’t believe in that [kind of cinema]” (Mousseau, 2021). Our next and final section returns to Quebec and explores Côté’s complicated relationship with his adopted province. Back to Quebec, with a Vengeance Quebec cinema is such a unique and culturally specific film industry that, during interviews, journalists almost inevitably end up asking Québécois directors about the relationship between their work and the francophone province. Denis Côté, like others, is used to these types of questions from both local and international interviewers. I have already pointed out his (purely provocative or entirely truthful) contention that he feels detached and politically disengaged from Quebec, and that his films reflect his own desire to extricate himself from all societies, including his own. When asked in the same interview about the québécitude [Quebecness] of his work, he nuanced his complete rejection of Quebec and stated a difference between some of his films in the way it is represented: While Carcasses could be of almost any nationality, except for the language at times, it’s true that in Les états nordiques, there is something very anchored, there is a language, a territory. It’s warmer. It reeks of Quebec. The québécitude of things interests me. You know, the more I travel, the more I discover that there are six million francophones surrounded by four hundred million anglophones [in North America]. When you travel around the world, you wonder about this identity. You have to go back in history to explain this language, it is unique

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in the world. I like the specificity of Quebec, not Quebec itself, but its specificity. Like in Bestiaire, there is a guy who answers the phone. There is a little Quebec moment, we keep it [in the final cut]. It’s not beautiful, but it has a musicality. Truffaut used to say: “I am not a French filmmaker, I belong to the world.” He did not want to be called a French filmmaker. (Messiant, 2012)

The reference to Truffaut at the end of this excerpt is interesting because Côté essentially suggests, without saying it directly, that he too wishes to disassociate himself and his work from his home territory, despite his stated fascination with its distinct linguistic and cultural status within North America. Ironically, the same year this interview took place, 2012, Bestiaire was the opening film at a festival specifically dedicated to the promotion and celebration of independent filmmaking in Quebec, Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (rebaptized Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma in 2018), which was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary that year. This love/hate, push/pull relationship between Côté and Quebec extends to, or is perhaps a direct consequence of, the way the Quebec film establishment has judged his output over the years: featured at the Jutra/Iris Awards and at local festivals but without winning prizes, considered a “figure de proue” [figurehead] (Messiant, 2012) of the renouveau du cinéma québécois while simultaneously being regarded as “à la marge” [on the margins] in relation to his peers; criticized for his “divisive” and “hermetic” cinema (Messiant, 2012), yet hailed for his internationally recognized reputation. Sylvain Lavallée, who works for the film magazine Séquences and was one of the eight critics and scholars who participated in the 2011 roundtable on the Quebec New Wave, had previously criticized his colleagues in a 2010 article when he suggested that the word “marginal,” which is repeatedly brandished to describe Côté’s cinema and the characters within it, was overused and rarely justified or explained in reviews. Defending Côté’s work against such a simplistic assessment, Lavallée continued: There is therefore a coherence in Côté’s work that is often unrecognized when [critics] note that all his films are different from each other, which is a very superficial remark. Beyond all these recurring themes, I was tempted throughout this text to open the idea of marginality that [the director] presents to a political dimension that would represent Quebec, which his films invite us to do (by the importance of place among others, often singularly Québécois), particularly in the case of Curling, with the character withdrawn in his own winter and closed off to the rest of

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the world appearing to me to be very close to the perception that I have of contemporary Quebec […] What is more certain is that Denis Côté does not make these individualistic and inward-looking films that he is sometimes criticized for, simple portraits of marginalized people without a broader scope, since his view of the individual is above all concerned with his or her relationship to society (necessarily so, in fact, since the terms individual and society imply each other). (2010a)

By coming to the filmmaker’s defense against his critics, Lavallée ironically highlights the very connection between Côté’s films and the land they inhabit that the director has repeatedly attempted to deny or downplay. Though Côté himself began in the industry as a film critic, it is perhaps because he feels misunderstood by Québécois reviewers that he has stated his disdain for them and chastised the way they write about his own cinema as well as that of his colleagues. As with his reference to Truffaut, France seems to be a land to look up to more than his own: Since I have been a film buff [rat de cinémathèque] from the start, I followed the great French critics. Of course, when I look at Quebec and its critics, it’s not about criticism, it’s not about putting the films into perspective: it’s just a reaction on the spot and always, always, always on the emotional side of things (did a film evoke an emotion?). On the other hand, how does a film fit into the history of Quebec or world cinema? There is never anyone who takes this into consideration. Quebec critics are not very good at placing works in a context. It’s always: “such and such an actor is good.” That’s certainly disappointing. When I see my film released in France and I read the reviews, there is a quality of vocabulary, a distance from the film, it is always placed in a framework. And then, it’s also fascinating to read […] You’ll have a hard time getting me to say that I admire the critics in Quebec. (Messiant, 2012)5

“Nul n’est prophète en son pays” [no one is a prophet in their own land], Côté once replied to a Québécois interviewer who remarked, as if on cue, that the director was better known and better considered outside Quebec’s borders (Cassivi, 2017). This has been the story of Côté’s career and his relationship with the critical establishment, but after breaking into the international scene with Carcasses, Côté made Curling (which has recognizable actors and a bigger budget than any of his previous films) with the deliberate intention to “win back” the public at home (“reconquérir chez lui”) and stated a “desire to reconcile” (“un désir de réconciliation”) with Quebec’s audience and critics (Gajan, 2015). The stratagem worked, to a certain degree, as the film received positive reviews and remains to this day one of his best-known works. However,

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it did not translate into the same success in Quebec that some of his fellow-directors received after their own breakthrough film, nor did it bring international distributors, advertisers, or TV producers knocking on his door (they still don’t knock, in 2022, as I write this). Nevertheless, Côté has admitted that Curling “brought peace” to his career (Gajan, 2015) and, after learning about countless other film industries through his extensive travels on the festival circuit, he stated in 2017: “I realize that, despite everything, I feel great working here [in Quebec] and I do not dream of making films elsewhere” (Cassivi, 2017). It is always a bit of a cliché to label a director’s work “unclassifiable,” but in comparison to his fellow contemporary Québécois directors, Côté has arguably been the most adept at dancing to the beat of his own drum; though he has also been very successful at securing regular funding for his films, including from both the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles and Telefilm Canada. For the past seventeen years, he has worked at the breathless pace of one or two films a year, producing an impressive fourteen full-length films and half a dozen short and medium-length works. And while some of his films, like Les états nordiques, Elle veut le chaos, Curling, and Vic + Flo, may conceivably be associated with Quebec’s renouveau because of their mood and aesthetics, others, like Bestiaire, Ta peau si lisse, Wilcox, and Hygiène sociale, are more radical in their storytelling and so oblivious of the codes of either fiction or documentary filmmaking that they somehow manage to resist categorization (with the exception of the loquacious Hygiène sociale, the other three films on the latter list may fit a critic’s description of Wilcox as a type of cinema “without dialogue or structured narrative, a cinematographic wandering that plunges its viewer into an unsettling experience;” Benammar, 2019). If we look beyond the renouveau trend and consider the nostalgic strain that Liz Czach and André Loiselle have identified as pervasive in 21st-century Quebec cinema, Côté’s filmography appears even more unfamiliar in comparison, as there is neither “reflexive” nor “restorative” nostalgia (2020, 3) in the stories he tells, despite their sharing a rural setting with many of the films they analyzed. Côté’s cinema is thus unsurprisingly absent from Czach and Loiselle’s volume, though his 2017 “male melodrama” Boris sans Béatrice, despite it being unconventional and “filled with holes” like other Côté films, could have been mentioned in Amy Ransom’s individual chapter on “Men in Pain” (2020). This brings us to 2022 and a June article by Québécois journalist Daniel Racine whose title translates as “Denis Côté, the astonishing

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director we all know … without knowing him.” After more than twenty directing credits and countless trips around the globe to present his work, Racine claims that most Québécois people have seen one, maybe two of his films, and many have seen none at all. The article goes on to present five “essential films” (Vic + Flo, Curling, Répertoire des villes disparues, Hygiène sociale, and Bestiaire) that he encourages his fellow citizens to watch in order to “discover” Côté’s talent (Racine, 2022). Earlier in 2022, Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma had also honored Côté’s cinema by screening, ahead of the summer release of his latest Un été comme ça, five rarely seen shorts, his music documentary on Marie Davidson and L’Oeil Nu Renegade Breakdown Live (2021) as well as Hygiène sociale. This recent recognition at the local level may signal an impulse on the part of Quebec’s critical establishment to recognize Côté’s work in a more deliberate way, though as we have seen with the successes of films like Curling and Répertoire des villes disparues, there have been other “turning points” in the director’s career that did not necessarily lead to an increased, unambiguously enthusiastic interest in his next projects. When asked about his future plans and his potential desire to make films with a higher budget, expand his fan base, or work in Hollywood (as several Québécois directors who started at home have done before him), Côté stated that his ambitions are limited by a degenerative illness diagnosed in 2007 that affects his kidney function and drains his energy (Cassivi, 2017; Demers, 2019). The condition has forced him to take breaks from his directing career, though it is not immediately apparent when looking at his filmography. And so, despite a longstanding reputation worldwide and more prizes that can fit on his mantel, Côté concludes: “My vehicles are smaller films that young people can watch on their phones if they want. I even send free Vimeo links of my films to those who write to me to see them!” (Cassivi, 2017). Côté’s career is unparalleled in Quebec’s film landscape as it is prone to false starts, appears at once big and small (depending on one’s perspective), has been hailed as brilliantly “entertaining” (Racine, 2022) but also deemed not “catchy” enough (Chahine, 2019, 41), and has been a source of both immense pride (considering his rayonnement on the international scene) and (relative) indifference. Quebec seems too small for his talent, which needs an international audience to be recognized, yet he has remained fiercely loyal to his home territory. Given this ambivalent trajectory, it is difficult to predict how Côté’s career will evolve. He is unlikely to become a household name in Quebec, unless someone finally asks him to make a commercial or direct the next installment of Les boys.

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Works Cited Alioff, Maurie. “Denis Côté.” The Canadian Encyclopedia (21 August 2014). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/denis-cote. Bailey, Patricia. “A New Generation of Quebec Filmmakers Captures a Culture Adrift.” This (6 July 2010). https://this.org/2010/07/06/quebec-film/. Baillargeon, Mercédès. “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 201–219. Benammar, Samy. “Wilcox, Denis Côté.” 24 images (29 November 2019). https://revue24images.com/les-critiques/wilcox/. Breuque, Bertrand. “Le film Curling de Denis Côté poursuit sa carrière internationale.” Patwhite.com (12 January 2011). https://patwhite.com/ le-film-curling-de-denis-cote-poursuit-sa-carriere-internationale. Cassivi, Marc. “Denis Côté: cinéaste pas si lisse.” La Presse (27 November 2017). https://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/cinema-quebecois/ entrevues/201711/27/01-5144966-denis-cote-cineaste-pas-si-lisse.php. Chahine, Joumane. “On the Road: Canadian Cinema and the World.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 35–51. Czach, Liz and André Loiselle, eds. Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. Delorme, Stéphane, “Je ne suis pas un réalisateur de l’effacement: entretien avec Denis Côté.” Cahiers du cinéma 692 (September 2013): 51. Demers, Maxime. “Les fantômes de Denis Côté.” Le journal de Montréal (10 February 2019). http://www.nouvellesvues.ulaval.ca/. Dequen, Bruno, “L’art de vivre entre deux chaises: entretien avec Denis Côté.” Nouvelles eues 11 (winter 2009–2010). http://www.nouvellesvues.ulaval. ca/. ——. “Table ronde sur le renouveau du cinéma québécois, avec Martin Bilodeau, Philippe Gajan, Marcel Jean, Germain Lacasse, Sylvain Lavallée, Marie-Claude Loiselle et Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan.” Nouvelles vues 12 (spring–summer 2011). http://www.nouvellesvues.ulaval.ca/. Dequen, Bruno, Martin Bilodeau, Philippe Gajan, Germain Lacasse, Sylvain Lavallée, Marie-Claude Loiselle, and Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan. “Table ronde: le renouveau du cinéma d’auteur québécois.” 24 images 152 (June– July 2011): 14–22. Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre. “L’expérience ordinaire chez Denis Côté: un renouveau philosophique.” Nouvelles vues 17 (Winter 2016). http:// www.nouvellesvues.ulaval.ca/. Frodon, Jean-Michel. “Carcasses. Entretien avec Denis Côté.” Cahiers du cinéma 645 (May 2009): 16–17.

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——. “Escale à La Rochelle.” Slate.fr (10 July 2011). https://blog.slate.fr/ projection-publique/tag/bunuel/. Gajan, Philippe. “Leçon de cinéma de Denis Côté.” Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (2015). https://vimeo.com/122649718. Gnaba, Sami. “Entrevues: Denis Côté.” Séquences (11 November 2010). https:// www.revuesequences.org/2010/11/denis-cote/. Hamel, Jean-François. “Le cinéma de Denis Côté: faire un autre cinéma.” Ciné-Bulles 27.1 (Winter 2009): 42–47. Lavallée, Sylvain. “À la frontière de la marginalité, le lieu chez Denis Côté.” Du cinématographe (26 November 2010a). https://ducinematographe. com/2010/11/a-la-frontiere-de-la-marginalite-le-lieu-chez-denis-cote/. ——. “Sur le renouveau du cinéma québécois.” Du cinématographe (12 November 2010b). http://ducinematographe.com/2010/11/sur-lerenouveau-du-cinema-quebecois/. Macheret, Mathieu. “Vic + Flo ont vu un ours de Denis Côté.” Cahiers du cinéma 692 (September 2013): 50. Messiant, Manon. “Six films plus tard: entretien avec Denis Côté.” Hors champ (20 December 2012). https://horschamp.qc.ca/article/entretienavec-denis-ct. Mousseau, Sylvie. “Denis Côté: regarder le monde autrement.” Acadie nouvelle (9 January 2022). https://www.acadienouvelle.com/arts-etspectacles/2021/11/12/denis-cote-regarder-le-monde-autrement/. Nicoud, Annabelle. “Denis Côté tourne Les lignes enemies.” La Presse (3 September 2009). https://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/nouvelles/201207/ 17/01-4550740-denis-cote-tourne-les-lignes-ennemies.php. Racine, Denis. “Denis Côté, l’étonnant cinéaste qu’on connaît tous … sans le connaître.” L’actualité (24 June 2022). https://lactualite.com/culture/ denis-cote-letonnant-cineaste-quon-connait-tous-sans-le-connaitre/. Ransom, Amy J. “Men in Pain: Home, Nostalgia, and Masculinity in 21st-Century Quebec Film.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 125–146. Sirois-Trahan, Jean-Pierre. “Le cinéma à l’estomac: Denis Côté and the New Wave of Quebec Cinema (2004–19).” Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023. 104–119. –——. “La mouvée et son dehors: renouveau du cinéma québécois.” Cahiers du cinéma 660 (October 2010): 76–78.

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Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the original French are my own. 2. More recently, film scholar Mercédès Baillargeon (2019) found the question of ennui to be an additional common denominator among renouveau directors and published an article on this topic. 3. After Jean-Michel Frodon left Cahiers du cinéma in 2009, other critics at the same journal have continued to give visibility to Côté’s films and review them rather positively. See for example Stéphane Delorme’s interview of Côté (2013) and Mathieu Macheret’s review of Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (2013). 4. Seven recipients of Canadian Screen Awards for best motion picture in the past ten years have been Quebec-based directors, in chronological order: Rebelle (War Witch, Kim Nguyen, 2012), Gabrielle (Louise Archambault, 2013), Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014), Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World, Xavier Dolan, 2016), Une colonie (A Colony, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, 2019), Antigone (Sophie Deraspe, 2019), and Beans (Tracey Deer, 2020). 5. The tendency to look up to and be influenced by European (and especially French) cinema is not unique to Côté but extends to Xavier Dolan and other independent directors from Quebec

chapter nine

Impossible Queerness in Three Transnational Films by Xavier Dolan Mercédès Baillargeon Impossible Queerness in Three Transnational Films

One of the defining Quebec filmmakers of the 21st century, Xavier Dolan’s work continually crosses lines of identity, gender, sexuality, medium, language, and national belonging. Applauded by international critics, Dolan is undoubtedly today’s most recognized Quebec filmmaker. As many have pointed out, Dolan’s persona and his visibility on the international scene have made him into a transnational figure, the poster child of Quebec cinema abroad, as well as one of the new faces of global millennial cinema, situating his work as that of a global auteur (Lafontaine, 2019, 1–4; Robinson, 2023, 25–26). Moreover, Dolan presents an often-reflexive positioning that refuses easy categorizations: he speaks English at Cannes, identifies doubly as a Canadian and a Quebec filmmaker, resists the notion of queer cinema though he is openly gay, and seems to carefully curate his media image through photoshoots, interviews, and his use of social media (Lafontaine, 2019, 1–2). As Ian Robinson suggests, Dolan exists within the limits of authorship as stardom, existing across the transnational borders of art cinema and popular culture (2023, 29–31), and the auteurstar, casting himself in many of his films, including his breakthrough J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009), Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010), Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm, 2013), and, more recently, in Matthias & Maxime (2019). For Julianne Pidduck, Dolan’s self-fashioning and self-fictionalizing, both in his films and paratextually, in the public arena, are strategies that serve to stage the artist and solidify his auteur status (2019, 54–55), which also appears as a “commercial strategy for organizing audience reception, as a critical concept bound to a distribution and marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of the author” (Corrigan, 2003, 98).

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Moreover, Dolan has won many accolades for his work, which also play into his allure as an auteur-star, including the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Mommy (2014) and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World, 2016). And his rising international profile has enabled him to work with some of the world’s leading actors, including in Juste la fin du monde and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018), in which he has cast heavyweights such as Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye, Léa Seydoux, Marion Cotillard, Natalie Portman, Kathy Bates, and Susan Sarandon (Robinson, 2023, 25). His films thus reflect emerging global mobility through storylines that take place in and go beyond the borders of Quebec as well as global cast, characters, and collaborations. In 2012, Dolan (in)famously turned down the Queer Palm for Laurence Anyways (2012), explaining that, though they touch on the topic, his films are not about sexual identity (Vlessing, 2012). Dolan explained his refusal by saying, “I’m just trying to blur this very clear line we’ve drawn and are drawing over and over and over again between communities. Saying those are queer films and those are films. I would love for that line to disappear. For that frontier to be abolished once and for all. I would love to stop putting names on things and claiming things” (Eidelstein, 2015). However, if Dolan resists the category of queer cinema, the questions of queerness and sexual identity nonetheless cut across his filmography to become, if not a consistent theme, at least a consistent element. This chapter proposes to analyze Tom à la ferme, Juste la fin du monde, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan— all three international coproductions, the first two between France and Canada, the third between Canada and the UK—to look at the problematic nature of queerness in Dolan’s work. I argue that Dolan’s engagement with queerness rests on a paradox and the multiple meanings of queer and queerness. The word “queer” has been integrated into the vernacular to become a synonym for gay, lesbian, and transgender identities. The recent multicultural turn risks transforming queerness into another identity to be represented in the postmodern mosaic of diversity (Alexander and Rhodes, 2011, 180). As Alexander and Rhodes explain, this multicultural inflection has led to the proliferation of “coming out” stories, or stories about the right to gay marriage, among other things. In these stories, queerness marks just another surface difference and fails to consider the radical difference of queerness. Many queer critics caution against this identarian turn, for queerness “can never define an identity; it can only

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ever disturb one,” according to Lee Edelman (2004, 17). One of Dolan’s feats is being able to direct these three films about queerness without ever naming it. Queerness remains unspoken, suggested, at the surface, aestheticized. In all three films, the main characters never mention their sexual orientation; if in the original plays of Tom à la ferme and Juste la fin du monde, the silence surrounding their characters’ queer identity was more directly related to the fear of rejection, social and familial ostracization, and violence, Dolan’s silences are more ambiguous. As Michel Foucault writes, “there is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (1978, 27). Indeed, in none of these movies is queerness explicitly discussed; desires are suggested, and the plot is predicated on the characters refraining from owning their sexual orientation or identity and not coming out. Queerness thus appears, in contrast, through what is unspoken. Indeed, the very essence of queerness, which makes it an impossible subject for compositions, is unsayable, unwritable, and unrepresentable. In these films, queerness appears as a superficial element of diversity/ identity on a narrative and aesthetic level that engages with notions of excess, unspeakability, and expressiveness. Dolan puts directly into play one of the fundamental difficulties of speaking, writing, or representing the queer subject by resisting the coherent queer narrative and privileging excess, opacity, and disruption. Hence, these three films also fail to express or represent queerness fully; consequently, feeling and emotion become a mode of expression that disrupts and disturbs representation and a way to modulate our relationship to narrative and identities, leading to universal tales that reach beyond the limits of national identity. I propose that, in the end, these three films are about the dual nature and (im)possibility of queer existence itself—and the possibilities afforded by the medium of cinema—beyond borders of nation, gender, sexuality, language, or identity. Same-sex Desire and the Impossibility to Communicate: Tom à la ferme Under a deceptively childish title, Tom à la ferme tells the story of Tom, a hip Montrealer played by Dolan himself who visits the Quebec countryside for his boyfriend’s funeral. The media reception of the film plays a significant role in defining Dolan’s love-hate relationship

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with the press as David Rooney (2013) from The Hollywood Reporter infamously denounced Dolan’s narcissism in Tom à la ferme, casting himself as the hero of this gay drama, to which Dolan responded via Twitter, adding to his enfant terrible image, that he “could kiss [his] narcissistic ass.” Extended tracking and panoramic shots show fields that spread as far as the eye can see, and extradiegetic music creates the impression of an isolated place separate from the rest of the world. As a thriller, this film leaves many questions unanswered, playing with the genre’s conventions, which often rely on withholding information (from the hero and viewer) to create suspense. We quickly realize that the tension between truth and lie is central to the plot: Tom meets his boyfriend’s mother, who is unaware of her late son’s queer identity. Tom also discovers that his lover Guillaume had a brother, Francis, whom he never spoke of, a virile, aggressive, and brutish young man. Furthermore, Francis insists in menacing terms that Tom keep his connection to Guillaume a secret from his grieving mother. Consequently, Tom’s right to be there is predicated on hiding the truth about Tom’s queerness and the true nature of his relationship with his lover Guillaume. Many things seem “impossible” to speak of, name, or accept in this universe; the truth about Tom and Guillaume’s queer love, of course, but also the unspeakable pain of grief of losing a lover, brother, and son. Based on the 2011 play of the same name by Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, the film shifts its interpretation to focus on mourning. Bouchard’s play focuses more on hiding the truth and lying as a survival strategy for queer folks in a homophobic world filled with potential violence and threat. The movie appears to be less a study of homophobia and more focused on the relationship Tom develops with his former lover’s family and the complications of grief, displaced desire, and sexual attraction. This is all folded into an impossibly murky game where nothing is said frankly and where desire is never admitted as such.1 For Marie Pascal, Dolan produces a kind of transcreation that produces a “shift in spirit” that slightly inflects the narrative’s focus and meaning to adapt to the rapidly changing reality of the global millennial generation’s experience of queerness (2019, 146). The film’s opening scene differs from that in the play. It sets the tone by presenting a nervous camera, with jump cuts, focusing on Tom’s hand scribbling his lover’s eulogy onto a paper towel as he sits in his car on his way to the funeral. He whispers, reading aloud what he has written: “Today, it’s like a part of myself is dying and I can’t cry […] Now all that is left to do with you gone is to replace you.” By inserting this scene into the film,

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Dolan changes the story’s framing and inflects its narrative arc slightly differently, “replacing” the lost lover thus becoming the film’s new quest. Indeed, Dolan’s version of Tom à la ferme is open to multiple interpretations, and the desire to replace the lost lover structures this psychological thriller. Because queerness remains “in the closet,” so to speak, meaning that Tom and his lover’s sexual orientation is kept concealed, the topic is not discussed frontally. Francis goes so far as to fabricate a fake girlfriend for his brother and keeps a photo of his brother kissing a woman on the lips. However, it remains unclear whether their mother would be offended by her son’s queerness. Instead of open discussion, Dolan’s film can find new meaning because it utilizes the lack of clarity in expression, the many silences, and the awkwardness already inscribed in Bouchard’s play. For example, when the mother asks Tom to tell her more about Sarah, appearing to address the camera rather than the mother, Tom provocatively talks about his own desire for Guillaume’s body: “Sarah? Yes, she said he had a great pair of arms that she liked when he wrapped them around her […] I liked the way his armpits sweated sometimes. Sometimes, just watching him walk, I knew that sex was going to be torrid. Take your undershirt off, show me your armpits, put your armpits against my mouth, take your dick out from the hole in your boxer shorts and come all over my face.” This passage, slipping from the pronoun she to I, and from he to you, allows Tom to express his longing, desire, and grief while showing how different characters can substitute each other in this economy of pain and desire. Moreover, thrillers, from the verb “to thrill,” “to cause (someone) to experience a strong feeling of enjoyable excitement” (as defined by Merriam-Webster), are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation, and anxiety. In the case of Tom à la ferme, it seems easier to show things than say them, leading to the film’s homoeroticism, meaning here that same-sex desire between Francis and Tom is suggested, once again shown rather than named. Rather than part of one’s identity, homoerotic desire is seen as fleeting, temporary, and affective (Younger, 2005, 80). In some cases, homoeroticism can be perceived as disowned same-sex desire (Dollimore, 1986, 10) or, more recently, associated with “queerbaiting.”2 It is also a place and a way to express otherwise socially “undisclosable” desires (Dollimore, 1986, 9). For Stefano Genetti, however, homoeroticism in Dolan’s adaptation “reinforces the sexual charge that comes with consenting to submission and pleasure within the act of being dominated, with all that this

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entail of concomitant repulsion and attraction and above all of mutual dependence” (2019). Accordingly, many scenes suggest same-sex desire, whether it be when Francis forces his way into Tom’s bathroom stall during the funeral reception, when Francis beats up Tom and then spits in his mouth, during their odd yet highly erotic tango in the barn, or when Francis pushes Tom against a wall with the weight of his own body. As the camera lingers on erotic body parts such as Francis’s eyes, lips, or neck, space and mise-en-scène are used to place Tom’s and Francis’s bodies near each other, in enclosed spaces, touching each other. Furthermore, Dolan also alternates, in these scenes, between slow motion, close-up, and subjective shots, which all accentuate eroticism and tactility. As Francis holds Tom by the throat, the latter tells him to go harder. Francis replies, his face next to his, “You tell me when to stop. You decide,” further building erotic tension between the characters. Central to the movie is also the question of losing a loved one and grief, and how that pain can sometimes be so overwhelming that it makes one feel like one is losing one’s mind. As Genetti (2019) writes, describing the differences between Bouchard’s play and Dolan’s adaptation, if the play both shows and reproduces the mechanisms of violence and lying that regulate queer existence within society, Dolan’s film, on the other hand, explores the desiring tensions and exchanges that traverse existence in general. Francis, who smells and sounds like Guillaume (“You smell just like him. You have his voice,” says Tom), becomes a stand-in for Tom’s deceased lover. This similarity draws Tom into “some perverse variant of Stockholm syndrome,” to quote Tara Brady (2014), in which he does not want to return to Montreal and sees himself staying with the Longchamp family. Tom, drawn into joining Francis’s duplicity, goes so far as to call one of his work friends, insisting she pretends to be Guillaume’s girlfriend. When Sarah arrives at the farm, she tries to convince Tom to return to the city. As André Loiselle notes, rural settings have in recent years become increasingly the site of contemporary horror films, tucked away from the cosmopolitanism of the city (2010, 141–142). Tom, however, argues that he has fallen in love with the authenticity of the countryside in contrast to the artificiality of life in the city. He thus returns to another modern Western trope which holds the belief that “rurality is synonymous with authentic experience and identity” (Santoro, 2020, 158). Sarah also brings to light another of Guillaume’s lies, announcing to Tom that his boyfriend would regularly cheat on him and that she, too, had slept with him. Furthermore, after being initially repulsed by Francis’s boorish and macho ways, and after

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she angrily asks him to drop her off at the bus station so she can return to Montreal that same night, Sarah also develops a sexual attraction to him. Conversely, Francis’s flirting with Guillaume’s ex-lovers also allows him to feel closer to his brother by taking his place in this secretive love triangle. As he leaves the car, where the sexual tension is mounting between Sarah and Francis, Tom finally discovers why Francis seems to be the town’s pariah. Indeed, many questions remain unanswered until the movie’s end: why are locals seemingly scared of the Longchamp family? Why does the taxi bringing Sarah refuse to drive all the way to the house? When Tom goes to the doctor to get an injury checked out, why does the doctor obliquely ask him how well he knows the Longchamps? The locals’ reactions serve as a mirror and a warning. During his visit to a bar called Les vraies affaires (a popular expression that can be translated to “The Real Deal,” or “Telling it like it is”), Tom discovers what happened: one night at the bar, Guillaume was dancing with a former queer lover and, in a fit of rage, Francis split open his jaw from ear to ear, leaving him disfigured. This served as a punishment and a warning to Guillaume to keep his queer desire secret. Finally, Tom returns to Montreal after recognizing Guillaume’s old lover and his scar at a gas station. Following Genetti’s (2019) proposition, I agree that “Bouchard’s play intends an identitary affirmation, problematized and transfigured through the motif of existential mystification, while Dolan’s film adopts the consistency of a fleeting and porous identity, to reformulate constantly. From fiction of identity, we slip towards identity as fiction.” In this economy of desire, characters are interchangeable; queerness here, if it is repressed rather than expressed, passes through lines of desire and is channeled through the tension between characters. The movie thus appears to be about the complex relationship between danger, desire, longing, and loss more than it is about homosexuality itself in which each character, in turn, becomes an object of redirected desire, but also a rampart against the traumatic reality of Guillaume’s death. [Not] Coming-out: The Unspoken in Juste la fin du monde Like Tom à la ferme, as well as most of Dolan’s other films, including J’ai tué ma mère, Mommy, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, Juste la fin du monde also focuses on complicated family structures. Dolan

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seemed poised to please the French market in his first film production with an all-French cast (although primarily filmed in Quebec). Instead, the film garnered checkered reviews from the press and was even booed at Cannes that year while still moving ahead and garnering two Césars (“Xavier Dolan,” 2019). An adaptation of French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce’s 1990 play of the same name, Juste la fin du monde tells the story of Louis, a writer returning home to his family after twelve years of absence to announce his impending death. This reunion rekindles memories but creates tension between family members. As in Tom à la ferme, the narrative plays on the tension between truth and lie. However, in Tom à la ferme, the lie is the precondition to Tom being able to attend his lost lover’s funeral, while, in Juste la fin du monde, the desire to tell the truth about his own death is what brings Louis back to his family. Though the entire film is constructed around what Louis set out to do during his visit to his family, he never finds the words, the courage, or the right time to deliver his news. As with Tom à la ferme, the movie operates a “shift in spirit” from Lagarce’s original play. If in Lagarce’s play, Louis’s visit also implied coming out as a gay man announcing his death (probably of HIV/AIDS, from which the playwright himself died), its remake twenty years later is not so much about queerness, and the fear associated with coming out and homophobia, as much as it is about the family’s violence, its estrangement, and its inability to communicate or connect. If both Lagarce’s play and Dolan’s adaptation set up the circumstances which typically lead to “coming out,” in Dolan’s film Louis’s family already knows about his homosexuality. Dolan displaces the knot of Lagarce’s play in such a way as to give it a new relevance in the 21st century, where the queer subject adopts a different kind of recognition strategy both at the plot level and aesthetically speaking. Framed almost exclusively in tight close-ups, Juste la fin du monde challenges composure and offers a rich, expansive, and excessive film; as Peter Debruge (2016) described it, “the result [of Dolan’s adaptation of Lagarce’s play] is a frequently excruciating dramatic experience in which characters seem almost never to stop talking.” Filmed as “tableaux” or “vignettes,” during which each character seemingly gets their turn to talk with (or talk at) Louis in an odd series of monologues, the movie preserves some of the theatricality of Lagarce’s play and his use of language. It accentuates each character’s emotional voraciousness and vociferousness. In this family, tension travels like a network, passing between each of its members as it (re)circulates. Antoine, the angry

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older brother played by Vincent Cassel, who both envies and hates Louis, appears explosive. Family members scream at each other, insult each other, and denigrate each other, with Antoine pushing the family towards their breaking point. As many queer theorists, such as Lee Edelman (2004), José Muñoz (1999), and Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1995), have suggested, queerness often presents excessive ways of thinking and writing that allow us to perform complicated critical work. This excess may carry over to the affective domain into difficult emotions we may not know what to do with or know how to contain. But, as Alexander and Rhodes write, “excess also exists textually as written movements and gestures that defy intellectual containability, that transgress our sense of what is knowable. Such moves also perform important critical work in asking us to think other, or at least to acknowledge movement, possibility, and being outside of the normative” (2011, 197). In between high-intensity scenes, Dolan places transition sequences during which extradiegetic music gradually covers the characters’ logorrhea or screams and instead draws attention to faces in slow-motion close-ups, showing melancholic smiles, lost gazes, or voices as if they were coming from elsewhere, all accentuating their sadness and disconnection. The characters are there and not there at the same time. In particular, the movie’s composition and editing create an almost unbearable tension; quick sequences of shot/ reverse shot, many from a subjective camera, as well as uncomfortable close-ups on each character’s face, create a suffocating atmosphere, playing with backlight and shadows, highlighting the characters’ tense features. In addition, most of the film’s action is limited to the family’s home, giving it a claustrophobic feel. As such, a network of intensities is effectively played out between the characters throughout Louis’s day-long visit, and Dolan makes palpable the feeling of isolation within the home and this family. Excessive screaming, insults, and silences translate into the family’s inability to communicate and connect. When Louis and his mother talk in the garage, filled with objects from their old home, she blames him for his short answers, “three words, as us(ual). Always two-, three word-answers, just like your postcards.” She tells Louis he needs to encourage and support his siblings, who look up to him, but also feel rejected by him. He should lie to his siblings, not about his sexual orientation as in Tom à la ferme, but she insists that he tell them what they want to hear: “even if it’s not true, even if it’s a promise that you won’t keep.” As in many of the elliptical dialogues in this film, the object is elided; indeed, we would typically “say something to

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someone,” with a direct and indirect object. But in this case, what should he be telling her, exactly? This odd grammatical peculiarity emphasizes Lagarce’s way of communicating what is unspeakable, alluding to it without fully expressing it. In addition, Dolan’s way of leaving the pronoun “it” vague and unspecified appears to be a way to underscore the difficulty inherent to communication. Similarly, all of these ellipses also allude to the question “Why are you here?”, which several characters ask throughout the film but which remains unanswered, emphasizing once again the family’s impossibility of communicating effectively. Dolan’s film is thus constructed on a paradox; the characters never cease to talk, yet they can never say what they mean. As Peter Debruge (2016) points out, with his excessive dialogue, “Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.” The excessiveness of Dolan’s adaptation—in its intensity, use of language, and mise-en-scène—appears to be a way to express what would otherwise be impossible. In the film’s final scene, Louis finally agrees to his mother’s request and lies to Suzanne and Antoine, telling them he will return to see them. He unnaturally breaks his silence, saying that he has something to tell them, and he tells Antoine they should meet for a meal to continue their conversation and invites Suzanne to visit him. Then Louis cuts the conversation short: “The truth is that I have to go,” which is a lie. Blindsided and in shock, his family pleads with him to stay longer. Antoine insists he will drive Louis to the airport, as if to protect him from having to tell the truth, and his family from hearing it, while his mother and sister blame him for his brother’s sudden volte-face and for ruining their special day with Louis. Finally, at a loss for words, Antoine turns his fist against Louis. However, in the end, all that seems to matter is that Louis’s secret is kept as he leaves the house, shutting the door behind him and leaving this claustrophobic place, separated from his real life. Affect and the Limits of Queerness: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan Contrary to Tom à la ferme and Juste la fin du monde, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan is an original screenplay and Dolan’s first film intended for the US market, with an international cast featuring household Hollywood names including Susan Sarandon, Natalie

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Portman, Kathy Bates, and Kit Harrington.3 The film focuses on a young actor who recalls his pen-pal relationship with his American TV idol, who died ten years earlier, exploring the hardships of fame and the hurdles of the movie business. A deeply flawed film in which Dolan attempts to bring together multiple storylines (Nayman (2018) bluntly described it as a “hot mess”), it is ambitious in its attempt to play on two temporal planes and intertwine multiple storylines to bring to light the vulnerabilities of his characters. In the present, Rupert, now a twentyone-year-old actor who has just published the correspondence he started with Donovan when he was eleven, is being interviewed by a journalist who is used to covering international conflict and finds little interest in this cultural piece. Dolan also uses flashbacks to depict Donovan’s life before his death under mysterious circumstances and Rupert’s troubled childhood. As Richard Dyer points out in Stars, stardom, as a social phenomenon, is created and consumed through its relationship to ideology (1998, 34). As the star of a popular teenage show, John F. Donovan feels he cannot publicly live out his life as a gay man, given that homosexuality was a taboo in the early 2000s (and perhaps remains so).4 Since stardom is “an image of the way stars live” (Dyer, 1998, 35), it blurs the line between actor and character. Donovan must therefore adhere to and represent specific values for fear of being ostracized by the public and the film industry. Trapped by his notoriety, a homophobic social environment, and a tendency to flee, Donovan dies of an overdose, either suicide or accident, and the cause of his death is left open. To cope, he confides his true self to eleven-year-old Rupert, a young fan who had sent him fan mail from across the Atlantic. It is worth noting here the truly transnational nature of this film’s plot, which takes place in the United States (views of New York City’s skyline regularly remind us of the story’s location), the UK, and Prague. The characters are cosmopolitan and highly mobile: for example, Audrey, the journalist, grew up in the Congo and shares her time between London and Prague, while Rupert grew up in London with his American mother, speaks with an American accent, yet finds himself in Prague for a film shoot. The television show Hellsome High, in which Donovan starred, gave Rupert an escape from bullying and not fitting in as a young aspiring actor, a queer child, and a displaced, global individual growing up in a country that is not his own. As Ian Robinson points out, the movie was met with “mild to harsh disapproval from critics” (2023, 30–31). For critic Jeanette Catsoulis (2019), “From its contrived structure to its forced speechifying, this story

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about a yearslong correspondence between Donovan (Kit Harington), a closeted actor, and Rupert (Jacob Tremblay), a troubled prepubescent boy, never acquires the emotional potency or coherence its themes [mother–son relationships, homosexuality, and a critique of celebrity and tabloid media in Hollywood] demand.” For Florence Maillard, “the movie is closely tied around an obsession, which is less the obsession of lying than the preservation of a secret identity (the fragility at the heart of the movie, which causes it to adopt clumsy defensive reflexes)” (2019, 25). Tara McNamara (n.d.) calls it a “[c]onvoluted gay-identity drama.” As Alexander and Rhodes warn us, “the way queerness is typically represented renders it unrepresentable. It becomes a series of tropes and clichés that elide its differences from normative heterosexuality” (2001, 180). The Death and Life of John F. Donovan walks that fine line between (bad) taste, clichés, and queer excess, as the film is filled with pompous, grandiose feelings and clichés, including those of the gay artist struggling with the pressures of fame, and seems to stay at the surface, refusing to dive deeply into its characters’ psyche (Castillo, 2019). Dolan recuperates stereotypes about queerness, including Donovan’s tendency towards self-harm and his fear of coming out. By falling into a series of tropes and clichés, Dolan confirms how queerness is an impossible subject that resists representation. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Dolan’s aesthetic of excess can be associated with camp (Baillargeon, 2019, 179), and his “expressive maximalism,” to use Bill Marshall’s expression (2016, 189), has received its share of criticism. By doing so, he engages in a kind of queer expression that also allows for an affirmation of queer life, despite some of the dark tropes the film visits (Donovan dies of an overdose, after all). Indeed, like others of Dolan’s films, much of the plot’s intensity and emotion are expressed through aesthetics, through “Dolan’s visually lush style with lots of close-ups, an overpowering score and much melodrama” (Dunlevy, 2019). Moreover, the movie’s reliance on an elaborate framing relying on flashbacks and present-day retelling creates a sense of artificiality and exaggeration which appears almost manipulative, as Jeanette Catsoulis describes: The strain comes from a framing device with the adult Rupert (Ben Schnetzer), now an openly gay actor, laboring to persuade an eye-rolling journalist (Thandie Newton) that his book about the correspondence isn’t celebrity fluff. Rather, it’s a treatise on truth, identity and the life-altering power of fame, at which point it feels as if we’re the ones Dolan is trying to convince. (2019)

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Indeed, the film seems trapped in a framework of self-justification, which “tries embarrassingly hard to move [the viewer] at all costs, at the expense of the trajectory of his characters” (Maillard, 2019, 25). This is especially true of the movie’s last scene, which appears excessively contrived; Audrey, who saw no interest in this cultural piece, is finally won over by Rupert’s touching tale after he interrupts himself to confront her to remind her that this could be anyone’s story. She is obviously touched (in awe, almost) as she wishes him the best of luck with everything, and they hug goodbye. Then Rupert walks out of the café and gets on the back of a moped with another man. Looking out the window and waving goodbye one last time, Audrey bursts out laughing as she finally understands that the true connection between John F. Donovan and the young Rupert, beyond their passion for acting, was also the secret they both kept about their sexuality, as if a mystery had somehow been elucidated. The journalist thus becomes the supposed reflection of the viewer’s reaction. If this strategy is meant to create complicity with the viewer, it also feels too obvious. This scene appears almost campy as it is so contrived, yet there is also pleasure and joy, both for the character of Audrey and the spectator, in figuring out this final “a-ha” moment. As Alexander and Rhodes remind us, “Queerness is a disruption in the service of nothing, pure in its joyful enraged body, sexed-up and inappropriate” (2011, 186). Beyond its “campiness,” which is almost uncomfortable in how forced it feels, this last scene creates a sense of jubilation (“A-ha! I’ve got it!”). So why use such a tacky filmic device? There is also genuine jubilation in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, precisely in its highly curated aesthetic of exaggeration. From this perspective, the film is an homage to US popular culture, which gestures towards the universality of Hollywood productions that travel beyond borders and reach a global scope. Indeed, Donovan appears as a doomed lead character from the start. The movie’s mise en abyme, with Rupert’s interview about his new book serving as a story frame, emphasizes the importance of popular culture and the desire to affirm one’s existence by having one’s image multiplied, confirmed, and reflected through the media apparatus, which, for Jean Baudrillard, appears as one of the greatest temptations and promises that the hyperreal can offer (1981). According to Richard Dyer, star consumption involves at least one of these criteria: star/audience relationships exist as emotional affinity, self-identification, imitation, and projection (1998, 18), all elements in Dolan’s film. As a star himself, Donovan also works as a screen for a multitude of misfit youngsters, who identify with him

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and his character in Hellsome High, and comes to mean so much more than a simple actor on a television show as “roles and/or the performance of a star in a film [can often be] taken as revealing the personality of the star” (Dyer, 1998, 20). Finally, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan appears as a metacommentary about its own reception. Indeed, Dolan seems to feel pleasure in creating this beautifully doomed character of John F. Donovan, crafting these atmospheres, and expressing these emotions, as “each shot is also an excuse to immerse yourself in the euphoria of its drama,” as Altor Salinas (2019) writes. As John F. Donovan struggles to reconcile his queer desire with his fear of seeing his public image ruined, Dolan himself has maintained a fraught relationship with stardom. From the earlier compliments—Quebec’s “wunderkind,” “boy wonder,” or “young prodigy”—the nicknames the press gave to him soon became backhanded: “notre surdoué,” “Sun King,” “darling child,” or “our little national genius” (Lafontaine, 2019, 1). Moreover, Valérie Mandia notes that, as Dolan gains notoriety outside of his home province, his reception and the comments about his work within Quebec become increasingly hostile (2014, 124). As previously mentioned, the fact that Dolan can be so highly mobile—among other things, he jumps from French to English, he moves around different cultures (France, Canada, Quebec, the US, etc.) with relative ease, he uses social media and interviews as opportunities to comment on current events (Lafontaine, 2019, 2)—seems to create discomfort in Quebec culture. Thus, Dolan takes pleasure not only in the movie’s luscious aesthetic, its soundtrack spiked by Adele and Florence + the Machine, and its often-grandiose cinematography, but he also seemingly delights in creating this ill-fated tale that plays with clichés and stereotypes. Using indirect means and exhibiting exaggerated emotion, Dolan perhaps also expresses a bit of himself in the doomed character of John F. Donovan. Conclusion As a key figure in global millennial filmmaking, Xavier Dolan pushes the boundaries and resists set categories on multiple levels, including those of national identity. In this chapter, I hope to have shown how Dolan investigates how the limits of queerness via Tom à la ferme, Juste la fin du monde, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, and how queerness appears, in different ways, an impossible subject.

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Without being about queerness per se, though it does play a central role in their plots, these films present queerness as unspeakable. They simultaneously explore the shame or fear of homophobic retaliation as presented in Bouchard’s and Lagarce’s plays, and as an affirmation of queer existence through narrative and aesthetic transgression. As Alexander and Rhodes point out, queerness not only claims room; it also troubles, disrupts, and disturbs the articulation of something altogether Other, not yet spoken, but felt (Alexander and Rhodes, 2011, 190). As such, it appears that Dolan’s cinema suggests the shortcomings of queer representation and instead shows how queer can be expressed, not so much as an identity but as a relationship to the world. Indeed, Dolan’s over-aestheticized cinema, which has been called “camp” and kitsch (Baillargeon, 2019; Chamarette, 2022), asks, how do we create a space, and what kind of space, for queer subjects to come into being and be reflected in? In Tom à la ferme, Juste la fin du monde, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, queerness is a universal difference. Yet these films also suggest that queer existence itself is enough to contest readily available identities and how they are created in relationship to and by others, and gesture towards the limits of representation itself. In all three films, Dolan presents the idea of difference as diversity but also as excessive and unrepresentable. His signature style, which has been both lauded and criticized, bears witness to his changing relationship with the world within and beyond the borders of the province, as Quebec’s “enfant chéri” with his first films and later growing into a global auteur (Robinson, 2023, 39). Speaking as scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition, for Alexander and Rhodes, queer composition “is valuing works that unsettle us, and inviting students to unsettle us with their own formal, stylistic, and contentrich experimentations. It is valuing free-form work. It is embracing a capaciousness of style” (2011, 201). For me, that is precisely what Dolan’s work accomplishes; if Tom à la ferme, Juste la fin du monde, and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan fail, in different ways, to fully express or represent queerness, they nevertheless succeed in creating a mode of expression in which feeling, emotion, and aesthetics disrupt and disturb representation. Dolan thus creates a vital excess that affirms unruly, queer existences and disturbs, disrupts, and refuses to obey the viewer’s (and society’s) expectations.

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Works Cited Alexander, Jonathan and Jacqueline Rhodes. “Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 31.1 (2011): 177–206. Baillargeon, Mercédès. “Joy, Melancholy, and the Promise of Happiness in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 177–190. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulations. Paris: Galilée, 1981. Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. “What Does Queer Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110 (1995): 343–349. Brady, Tara. “Tom at the Farm/Tom à la Ferme Review: A Work of Genius.” The Irish Times (4 April 2014). https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ film /tom-at-the-farm-tom-%C3%A0 -la-ferme-review-a-work-ofgenius-1.1748944. Castillo, Monica. “The Death & Life of John F. Donovan.” Rogerebert.com (13 December 2019). https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-deathand-life-of-john-f-donovan-movie-review-2019. Catsoulis, Jeanette. “‘The Death & Life of John F. Donovan’ Review: A Child Is Torn.” New York Times (12 December 2019). https://www.nytimes. com/2019/12/12/movies/the-death-and-life-of-john-f-donovan-review. html. Chamarette, Jenny. “Agnès Varda and Xavier Dolan: Between Politics, the Art House and Popular Culture.” French Screen Studies 22.4 (2022): 345–351. Corrigan, Timothy. “The Commerce of Auteurism.” Film and Authorship. Ed. Virginia Wright Wexman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 96–110. Debruge, Peter. “Cannes Film Review: It’s Only The End of the World.” Variety (18 March 2016). https://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/its-only-the-end-ofthe-world-review-xavier-dolan-1201777980/. Dolan, Xavier, dir. Les amours imaginaires. Mifilifilms, Société de Développement des Entreprises Culturelles (SODEC), Téléfilm Canada, Radio-Canada Télévision, 2010. ——. J’ai tué ma mère. Mifilifilms, 2009. ——. Juste la fin du monde. MK2 Productions, Diaphana Films, Sons of Manual (coproduction), 2016. ——. Laurence Anyways. Lyla Films, MK2 Productions, 2012. ——. The Life and Death of John F. Donovan. Lyla Films, Sons of Manual, Warp Films, 2018. ——. Matthias & Maxime. Sons of Manual, Téléfilm Canada, Société de Développement des Entreprises Culturelles (SODEC), The Harold

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Greenberg Fund, Radio-Canada, PHI Studio, Fonds Québécor, Super Écran, 2019. ——. Mommy. Metafilms, Société de Développement des Entreprises Culturelles (SODEC), Sons of Manual, Super Écran, Téléfilm Canada, 2014. ——. Tom à la ferme. MK2 Productions, Sons of Manual, Arte France Cinéma (participation), Canal+ France (participation), Ciné+ (participation), 2013. Dollimore, Jonathan. “Homophobia and Sexual Difference.” Oxford Literary Review 8.1–2 (1986): 5–12. Dunlevy, T’Cha. “Xavier Dolan’s Death and Life of John F. Donovan Finally in Canadian Theatres.” Montreal Gazette (22 August 2019). ht t ps: //montrealgazet te.com /enter tainment / local-ar ts /xavierdolans-death-and-life-of-john-f-donovan-finally-in-theatres. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI Publishing, 1998. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Eidelstein, Eric. “‘Mommy’ Director Xavier Dolan Doesn’t Want You to Label His Films.” IndieWire (19 January 2015). https://www.indiewire. com/2015/01/mommy-director-xavier-dolan-doesnt-want-you-to-labelhis-films-2-66142/. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality I: The Will to Know. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Genetti, Stefano. “La scène, l’écran: questionnements identitaires et tensions du désir dans Tom à la ferme de Michel Marc Bouchard et de Xavier Dolan.” Itinéraires 2–3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.4000/itineraires.7091. Grandena, Florian and Pascal Gagné. “Xavier Dolan’s Backward Cinema: Straight Spaces, Queer Temporality, and Genealogical Interruptions in Tom at the Farm and It’s Only the End of the World.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 80–97. Lafontaine, Andrée. “Introduction.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 1–27. Loiselle, André. “Popular Genres in Quebec Cinema: The Strange Case of Horror in Film and Television.” How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts of Canadian Popular Culture. Ed. Bart Beaty, Derek Briton, Gloria Filax, and Rebecca Sullivan. Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, 2010. 141–159. Maillard, Florence. “Fragiles.” Cahiers du cinéma 753 (2019): 24–25. Mandia, Valérie. “Le septième art hors des frontières nationales: le pouvoir de la langue et de l’imaginaire culturel dans les films du cinéastes québécois Xavier Dolan.” Francophonies d’Amérique 37 (2014): 105–132.

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Marshall, Bill. “Spaces and Times of Québec in Two Films by Xavier Dolan.” Nottingham French Studies 55.2 (2016): 189–208. McNamara, Tara. “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.” Common Sense Media (n.d.). https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/ the-death-and-life-of-john-f-donovan. Mendez II, Moises. “Why Queerbaiting Matters More Than Ever.” Rolling Stone (23 July 2021). https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ queerbaiting-lgbtq-community-1201273/. Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nayman, Adam. “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, Canada/UK)—Special Presentations.” Cinemascope (13 September 2018). https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/the-death-and-lifeof-john-f-donovan-xavier-dolan-canada-uk-special-presentations/. Nordine, Michael. “‘The Death and Life of John F. Donovan’: Jessica Chastain Cut From Xavier Dolan’s Upcoming Film.” IndieWire (4 February 2018). https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/the-death-and-life-of-johnf-donovan-jessica-chastain-xavier-dolan-1201924983/. Pascal, Marie. “Transcreating Tom à la ferme and Juste la fin du monde.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 136–155. Pidduck, Julianne. “The Dolandrama: Queer Male Authorship and the Fabulous Leading Lady.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 52–79. Robinson, Ian. “Speaking across Borders: Xavier Dolan and the Transnationalism of Contemporary Auteur Cinema in Quebec.” Canadian Cinema in the New Millenium. Eds. Lee Curruthers and Charles Tepperman. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. 25–41. Rooney, David. “Tom at the Farm: Venice Review.” The Hollywood Reporter (2 September 2013). https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/generalnews/tom-at-farm-venice-review-619296/. Salinas, Altor. “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” EAM Cinema (18 December 2019). https://www.elantepenultimomohicano.com/2019/12/critica-death-andlife-of-john-f-donovan.html. Santoro, Miléna. “The Rural (Re)Turns of Young Protagonists in Contemporary Quebec Films.” Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Eds. Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 149–179. Vaillancourt, Julie. “Tom à la ferme: mensonges et angoisses du huis clos à ciel ouvert.” Séquences 290 (2014): 48–49. Vlessing, Ian. “Cannes 2012: Canadian Director Xavier Dolan on ‘Laurence Anyways’ (Q&A).” The Hollywood Reporter (18 May 2012). https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/cannesfestival-xavier-dolan-qa-326081/.

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“Xavier Dolan Receives One of France’s Highest Honours.” CultMTL (26 November 2019). https://cultmtl.com/2019/11/xavier-dolan-franceorder-of-arts-and-letters/. Younger, John G. Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Notes 1. Many critics, including Grandena and Gagné (2019), Genetti (2019), and Vaillancourt (2014), highlight the central place of homophobia in Tom à la ferme, and so does Michel Marc Bouchard in the foreword to his play. 2. The term “queerbaiting” describes a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance or offer other LGBTQ representation. According to Leo Herrera, queerbaiting can also be when “a celebrity or a public figure capitalizes on the suspicion they may be romantically involved with another same-sex person for the sake of publicity, promotion or a capitalistic gain” (Mendez II, 2021). 3. Jessica Chastain also played a journalist in the film, but her subplot was cut during editing in the interest of narrative cohesion (Nordine, 2018). 4. To put things in perspective, gay marriage was only legalized in the United States under President Obama in 2015 and remains a deeply divisive issue in American politics today.

chapter ten

Exploring and Transcending Québécité in Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime and Monia Chokri’s La femme de mon frère Loïc Bourdeau and Peadar Kearney Exploring and Transcending Québécité In the introduction to their special issue of @nalyses on contemporary French-Canadian productions, Pénélope Cormier and Isabelle KirouacMassicotte argue that “Quebec’s literary renewal seems so significant that it is associated with an entire literary movement in Quebec today; writers from this movement are part of what [Mathieu Bélisle] calls the great explorations era” (2019, 5).1 They add that while this movement is quite engagé, it is no longer focused on the question of national identity. Rather, it is focused on new encounters with the unknown; it is about putting oneself in danger (2019, 5). In a similar (and earlier) fashion, Bill Marshall shows in his foundational work Quebec National Cinema that the post-1980s film industry began to be “preoccupied less by national self-definition, assertion, and creation than by the awareness of a Quebec inserted in global flows of culture and communication” (2001, 285). In “Spaces and Times of Québec in Two Films by Xavier Dolan,” Marshall further confirms that “the sovereignty project is the preference of the baby boomer generation but no longer that of those aged eighteen to thirty-four” (2019, 102). Born respectively in 1983 and 1989, Monia Chokri and Xavier Dolan belong to this generation of millennial artists who seem to proudly embrace their Québécois identity, are less vocal about Quebec’s independence, and demonstrate strong engagements with more globalized concerns and issues.2 Xavier Dolan has become a fixture in Quebec cinema (and queer studies) since his critically acclaimed debut feature J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) and subsequent seven films (almost one per

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year) that have also encountered much success in Quebec, France, and on the festival circuit. From Laurence Anyways (2012) to Mommy (2014) and from directing British singer Adele’s most-watched music videos (“Hello,” 2015 and “Easy on Me,” 2021) to modeling for French luxury brand Louis Vuitton, Dolan has consistently proven to have a clear voice, which he is not afraid to use. At once praised and harshly criticized— “Dolan became, in fact, an early casualty of nascent ‘millennial bashing’” (Lafontaine, 2019, 2)—he has undoubtedly made his mark on the Quebec cinematic landscape. Shot in Montreal and the Laurentides region of Quebec (a popular weekend destination an hour and a half away from the city), Matthias & Maxime (2019) tells the story of two best friends in their late twenties—Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) and Maxime (Dolan)— who are shaken up by a romantic kiss they exchange to help out their friend’s sister with her film assignment. Matthias, uptight and at times controlling, works in Montreal’s business district, has a caring girlfriend and a supportive divorced mother. Maxime is a bartender who takes care of his mentally ill mother and hopes to move to Australia. After a trip to a lake cabin with friends where they kissed for the aforementioned film project, the relationship changes. Matthias, in particular, appears troubled; both young men are forced to reassess their lives, their choices, their identities. Throughout the film, Maxime also struggles to obtain a reference letter from Matthias’s father, a businessman in Chicago, for whom he previously worked. A number of parties take place, tension increases until one night when they make out briefly, before Matthias leaves. The two do not meet again until the very open-ended final scene of the film, when we also learn that Matthias had received the reference but never passed it on to Maxime. Released the same year, the second film of interest to our analysis is Chokri’s debut La femme de mon frère (A Brother’s Love, 2019). Initially known for her acting work, in particular her roles in Dolan’s earlier productions, Chokri moved behind the camera to share the story of thirtysomething single Sophia (Anne-Élisabeth Bossé) who has recently received her PhD in French philosophy and whose close bond with her brother Karim (Patrick Hivon) is tested by his new love interest. After having received her degree, Sophia finds work at a local art gallery (until she is fired), lives rent-free with her brother, watches a lot of reality television, and is quite invested in his new relationship. She herself tries to date and, through heated conversations with her friends and parents, makes it clear she does not want children. Eventually, she accepts a job as a French instructor for newly arrived immigrants, starts dating

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Jasmin (Mani Soleymanlou), and is more accepting of her brother’s love. At the cinematographic level, “There are jump cuts, montage effects, a shared cinematic sensibility with Xavier Dolan” (Lussier, 2019).3 Indeed, stylistic and thematic similarities between the two directors are quite striking. Yet, beyond the shared sensibility, Chokri pushes the boundaries of diversity and visibility further. By engaging in close textual readings of each film, this chapter explores the ways in which Dolan and Chokri each reflect on Quebec’s singular status in North America and how they develop cinematic worlds that draw on mainstream culture and social debates. Indeed, while a significant portion of “Quebec cinema is fundamentally inexportable” (Marshall, 2010, 122), both Dolan’s and Chokri’s filmmaking displays the transnational or globalized dimension of the Western—and more specifically, millennial—condition and its attendant considerations (e.g., masculinity, womanhood, class struggles, contemporary sociality, etc.). Both films are inserted into, influenced by, and effectively contribute to today’s “global flows of culture.” And, if “cinéma-monde is fundamentally about ‘encounters’ between different cultures and perspectives” (Gott and Schilt, 2018, 10), we argue that Dolan and Chokri demonstrate similar facets, make audible a diversity of lived experiences, and bring about cinematic worlds that exist, and can only exist, because of their openness to the world outside of the province. Matthias & Maxime and La femme de mon frère are thus at once Québécois and global productions. Finally, whereas Marshall argued, in 2001, that “The Quebec national project is riven with the tension between territorialization and deterritorialization because of the competing discourses of Québécité and Américanité” (12), the more recent millennial productions of interest here seem to bring forth not so much competing discourses, but instead a décomplexé [unabashed] national project finally “in a position to relay the multiple surfaces of belonging which constitute the new horizons of ‘Québecness’” (Marshall, 2019, 111), along with an acute commitment to representation, equality, and diversity. Fabricating Québécité with Xavier Dolan Opening on a close-up of running shoes in motion on a treadmill before cutting to a shot of Matthias’s and Maxime’s sweating faces, Dolan’s film quickly anchors the narrative in contemporary sociality—a modern gym in a glass building amid other seemingly modern skyscrapers—while

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blurring the spatial lines. The next scene shows the two men in Matthias’s car. Stuck in traffic, they are surrounded by sounds of jazz music, honks, indiscernible dialogue, and sirens that are specific to North America. Yet the brief exchange in Québécois French at the gym between the two men and Maxime’s staring at a commercial billboard for “Le Pain Sainte Famille” [Holy Family Bread] (00:02:19) help us locate the scene in the French-speaking province. Indeed, the various elements and urban background hint at Montreal, but quickly moves away from it. An aerial tracking shot of a road and its yellow middle lines ensues and places the viewer in fall scenery reminiscent of New England. As the two leads finally arrive at the cabin by a lake, they meet close friends, one of whom is wearing a stars and stripes jacket. In these first few minutes the film engages in a form of deterritorialization that complicates spatial identification and perhaps points towards “the impossibility of being fully, purely and unproblematically Canadian, Québécois, American” (Marshall, 2010, 130). If spatial belonging remains central to the film, it nevertheless appears to reflect the multifarious and border-defying identities of young individuals who play an active role in today’s globalized world. Although from different social milieus, the main protagonists are clearly of their time: they work in the city during the week, enjoy weekend getaways, want to travel abroad to work—Maxime is set to leave for Australia in about two weeks and his brother works in Connecticut—and have specific generational references. For instance, shortly before filming the kissing scene at the lake house, Matthias asks the “annoying” sister if her friend (with a spiky hairdo) is sticking around: “And does Vegeta have to be here?” (00:18:20). Not knowing who Vegeta is, Maxime tells the young girl he is “The asshole in Dragon Ball” (00:18:30), an international television success in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. For (Western and French-speaking) millennial viewers, Matthias & Maxime exudes a strong sense of familiarity despite the localized experiences. At 01:13:41, Maxime and three other friends are in a car headed to a party when Franco-Israeli singer Amir’s bilingual (Eurovision) song “J’ai cherché” comes on the radio; they all sing along in French and English: “C’est quand on n’y croit plus du tout. Qu’on trouve un paradis perdu en nous […] you, you, you, you / You, You’re the one that’s making me strong.” This instance perhaps comes to epitomize Quebec’s hybridity and location within a transnational cultural network. At the same time, the temporal context of the film—the aforementioned millennial struggles and modes of sociality—tends to supersede spatiality.

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Upon their return from the cabin, the film shows Matthias in his boss’s office, wearing a suit and being praised for his good work. The boss notes: “It won’t be long before I give you more responsibility, or as I like to call it, a two-window office!” (00:28:40). We are quoting the official English subtitles, but the French here is significant—“une vue sur René Lévesque” [a view over (Boulevard) René Lévesque]— insofar as it clearly identifies downtown Montreal (the business district). Ever since his first film, Dolan has made the Quebec metropolis his main playground, while oftentimes favoring its suburban outskirts. For Marshall, citing Andrée Fortin, “the suburbs have tended to become […] the ‘default’ setting for the representation of family life, including single parenthood” (2019, 110). They also come to represent both Montreal and any generic city (110). This generic dimension is what allows Dolan to depict lived experiences that are personal and relatable, contextualized and transnational. Other references to Apple products, Instagram, and Britney Spear’s music further play into this constant duality and anchor the film into the current moment. At the technical level, the inclusion of shots on film (8 mm and 35 mm), which gives the image a grainy, filtered texture, and Dolan’s play with angles also underline the influence of social media in our lives and the way users frame, alter, enhance, or distort reality. At 00:13:20, Dolan uses a 9:16 aspect ratio—similar to an iPhone screen or a full vertical Instagram story—that poses as a window through which viewers see Matthias and Maxime doing the dishes for about twenty seconds. In this instance, Dolan does more than play with technique, he plays with contemporary visual codes that operate within and beyond Quebec; it also signals that beyond that perfectly framed shot, something is brewing, life is happening. In his review for Le Monde, Thomas Sotinel writes that Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime “est par ailleurs le plus québécois de ses films” [is also the most Québécois of his films] (2019). Sotinel’s assessment seems based on the narrative proximity between Dolan’s film and Denys Arcand’s Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986): “It starts with a 21st-century version of a ritual that Denys Arcand’s films […] have made familiar: a getaway with friends, far from the city, in a cabin by a lake” (2019).4 Though it seems hardly enough and overall arbitrary to posit that this film is more Québécois than his previous ones, it is however true that Matthias & Maxime inscribes itself into a clear cinematic lineage and pays homage to classic Québécois films such as Arcand’s but also Jean-François Pouliot’s international box office hit La grande séduction (Seducing Dr. Lewis,

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2003). Indeed, during another conversation with his boss, Matthias is asked to welcome a young lawyer from Toronto, Kevin McAfee (Harris Dickinson): “He’s coming on Friday to have a look around, check out the firm. It’s pretty straightforward. Take him out, woo him […] Make sure he tells his bosses to come see us next week” (00:52:00).5 The boss uses the expression “la grande séduction” [the great seduction], a direct reference to the film in which a remote community of villagers work hard to ensure that a newly arrived doctor (from Montreal) stays in residence. Additional references include Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (“Are you ready for your close-up?”; Billy Wilder, 1950), The Dark Knight Rises (“Your punishment must be more severe”; Christopher Nolan, 2012), or Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997), all of which point to a new form of intertextuality turned towards North America, rather than France as in his previous films. By layering his film with such rich intertextuality and resorting to mise en abyme—it is a film about a filmed kiss with film references—Dolan not only confirms his ability “to sustain a personal signature across different genres and production contexts [which is] the most unequivocal sign of the auteur” (Morrey, 2020, 194), he reminds us above all of his love for cinema as an art form. Perhaps the most striking example of this affective attachment to cinema is the make-out scene between Matthias and Maxime, which brings together two major references. At 01:30:40 (or twenty-nine minutes before the end of the film), after much confusion and tension at a house party, Matthias follows Maxime to a back room (a garage or workshop). As he walks closer to that room, he stops in the hallway and looks up at the flickering lightbulb. The walls, covered with square shower-like tiles and the high-angle shot of Matthias’s face echoes Hitchock’s famous bathroom murder scene in Psycho (1960), a reference Dolan had already used in his 2013 thriller Tom à la ferme/Tom at the Farm. Shortly after, he joins Maxime in the other room, grabs his hand, kisses it, kisses his lips, and eventually reaches under his shorts and underwear. The camera moves outside the house and pans from right to left until the scene becomes visible to all. It remains somewhat blurry as plastic tarp covers the large window against which they kiss. Maxime’s right hand rests against that window as Matthias’s reaches for it. Hand-in-hand, the lovers conjure up the steamy sex scene in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). In an interview with Vanity Fair, Dolan recounts the impact that film had on his life: “He watched the movie more than 100 times. And he learned English ‘so I could one day act with DiCaprio, with whom I became manically obsessed. Titanic was the impetus to all passions’”

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Fig. 10.1: Matthias & Maxime

(Blasberg, 2015). We return to Sotinel’s comment and thus wonder: Is Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime his most Québécois film because it is something of a rewrite of Arcand’s classic? Because it is filled with international references? Or because his cinematic world is the result of personal and emotional investments that Quebec, by its very hybrid and transnational nature, made and still makes possible? It might be all of these things. Regardless, this hyper-referential network shows that, for Dolan, cinema is the fabric of cinema. New Horizons of Québécité with Monia Chokri As we turn to La femme de mon frère, Chokri’s hybrid stylistic approach provides a sense of tension between Québécité and Américanité, which likewise reflects Quebec’s cultural singularity as a francophone region of North America. On the one hand, the film’s narrative structure, with its ambivalent ending that provides no direct answers for many of the questions that the narrative raises, resonates with auteur cinema. The film also makes use of nonrepresentational elements as a tool of expression, such as the color blocks of pink and blue that are used to transition between certain scenes. These recall the 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard, such as Le mépris (Contempt, 1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965). Yet, on the other hand, Chokri makes little use of handheld camera (a staple of auteur cinema) and overall conforms to a specific genre, comedy in this case. Comedy tends to be the most popular genre

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in Quebec, France, and the United States; what matters, however, is that we now have a heroine, while most comedies in Quebec are male-dominated. The film also draws on screwball, physical comedy at certain points, a style whose roots can be found in 1930s Hollywood. In terms of visual and editing style, Chokri opted for a fast and direct approach and added much post-production sheen to the image. Whereas Dolan blurs geographical lines more effectively, Chokri relies instead on style to convey Quebec’s unique geographical, cultural, and linguistic positions. The two, however, likewise inscribe their filmmaking into mainstream culture. Indeed, in La femme de mon frère, American pop culture, namely recurring images of Kim Kardashian, plays a key part in the narrative and contribute to the film’s discussion of womanhood and motherhood, as we explore later on. A further expression of the film’s “Quebecness” can be found in a simultaneous presence of traditional Québécois elements alongside more recent trends of multiculturalism. Considering that “Quebec’s ‘visible minorities’ (… 92% of Quebec’s population of recent immigration origin live in [Montreal’s] greater area) have for long been relatively invisible in Quebec film production” (Marshall, 2010, 132), Chokri’s work is proving more inclusive and attuned to social diversity and questions of migration. It also illustrates a broader cinematic phenomenon in contemporary Quebec cinema whereby the expression of global trends of multiculturalism gains more visibility, although more local expressions of traditional identity remain predominant. Or, as Mercédès Baillargeon and Karine Bertrand argue, Quebec’s cinema and media are more aware of the “world that exists beyond its ever-more porous borders, while remaining anchored in Quebec’s cinematographic, political, and cultural tradition” (2019, 138).6 In the case of La femme de mon frère, the film offers and relies on hyperlocal references such as the Québécois dialect of French and other famous cultural markers of Quebec (and in particular, Montreal) identity. For instance, when Sophia has an appointment with her gynecologist and future sister-in-law, Eloïse (Evelyne Brochu), she wears a t-shirt adorned by the “St-Viateur Bagel” logo. St-Viateur is a famous bagel bakery located in the popular neighborhood of Mile-End/ Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal. Perhaps an auteurist signature— Chokri resides in this very neighborhood—it certainly showcases the city’s multicultural dimension as bagels hail from the Jewish diaspora. Later on, after a period of unemployment Sophia is offered a job teaching French to immigrants in Longueuil (a suburb located five miles southeast of Montreal, across the St. Lawrence river). She comically

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complains, “C’est en banlieue? Impossible, c’est à l’autre bout du monde” [In the suburbs? Impossible, it’s on the other side of the world] (1:28:38). Although the joke will speak to viewers who have some knowledge of Montreal’s geography, the irony and clear dichotomy between city and suburb is enough to resonate with all viewers. At the other end of the spectrum, the film also features several examples of the global, which it does not posit as competing or foreign, but rather, and in fact, as an integral component of the local. The global makes the local, and vice versa. Sophia’s family at the core of the narrative is an example of this: her father immigrated to Quebec from an unnamed Arab country and her mother is a white Quebecer, making Sophia (and her brother) a product of this local/global duality. It is perhaps no coincidence that she ends up teaching immigrants, seeing that they share similarities (though it is never mentioned explicitly). In fact, in one of the film’s more poignant moments, when Sophia is teaching, a series of close-ups feature her students who reveal where they are from, their professional background, what they would like to do in Canada, and what they miss from home. With all of them being highly qualified and working in varying fields, the scene goes against the grain of stereotypical representations of recently arrived immigrants. It serves once more— despite growing nationalist and xenophobic discourse—as a reminder that Canada, Quebec included, is a multicultural immigration nation. And, at the level of sound, the film also builds a notion of Québécité grounded in cosmopolitan multiculturalism: we hear contemporary Quebec music such as “Work It” by Marie Davidson, a francophone Montrealer who sings in both French and English, and “Only You” by Steve Monite, an Afro-disco artist from Nigeria. At one point, Sophia cringingly watches her parents dance to “Männer müssen Männer sein” by Britt Kersten, a German 1970s pop-rock track. And during a montage of Sophia and Jasmin’s first successful date, we hear “Rouhi Ya Hafida,” an Arabic funk-disco track by Mallek Mohamed. Chokri’s soundtrack is a testament to Quebec’s diversity and makes explicit the cohabitation of the hyperlocal and the global. Several reviews of La femme de mon frère compared the film to the French New Wave. Murielle Joudet for Le Monde described its framing style as “des joyaux qui évoquent Godard” / [jewels that evoke Godard] (2019, 20). For Douglas Morrey, who analyzed the legacy of the New Wave, the movement would often make references in their films to “high-minded art […] alongside generic thrillers” (2020, 195).7 It appears that Chokri likewise blurs the distinction between an “intellectual”

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and “popular” culture dualism.8 On the one hand, Sophia can discuss her PhD thesis and share her thoughts on the work of Michel Foucault; on the other, she often binges quiz and reality TV shows. Morrey adds that New Wave filmmakers “rendered the distinction between fiction and documentary film much more permeable” (5). Like Godard in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), Chokri inserts herself into her film. This occurs at the end when Sophia and her now boyfriend Jasmin take a paddleboat on an urban park lake. A series of close-ups show that they are joined by other pairs on paddleboats. Among them are Chokri and her real-life brother. Commenting on the image in the film’s press material, Chokri—who has built an alter ego in Sophia—reveals that her presence in the film is much more than a simple cameo: “I wanted to end the film on this mix of reality and fiction to take the film somewhere else” (Chokri, 2019).9 What initially seems a stylistic trait borrowed from the French New Wave was however, as Chokri reveals, inspired by the cinéma direct in 1960s Quebec: “Les films de Claude Jutra, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault m’ont beaucoup influencée” [Claude Jutra’s, Michel Brault’s, and Pierre Perrault’s films have influenced me greatly] (2019). In À tout prendre (Take It All, 1963) for example, Jutra plays the main character, whose name is also Claude, and although a piece of narrative fiction, the film draws heavily on the visual style of documentary film of the time. Similar comparisons with the New Wave were made frequently about Xavier Dolan’s early career (see Baillargeon, 2014). This is particularly noteworthy when we consider that Chokri acted in two of his films and seems to have inherited something of his highly stylized and colorful aesthetic. Writing for 24 images, Apolline Caron-Otavi compares their styles and remarks on their common use of “excessively demonstrative music, colorful intersessions that connect the scenes, without forgetting the hysteria that can arise at any moment” (2019).10 These points are quite accurate, however they overlook a much more direct link between their bodies of work. Dolan’s Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010) opens with a character played by the actress who plays Sophia in La femme de mon frère, Anne-Elisabeth Bossé, discussing her love life in a humorously self-deprecating manner. Both Dolan’s and Chokri’s characters are self-involved and pessimistic, especially about their love lives, yet they manage to discuss these intimate subjects in a comically nihilistic manner. Given that Chokri played one of the lead characters in Les amours imaginaires—and that both Bossé and Chokri also played in Laurence Anyways—this intertextual link joins the two filmmakers

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further still. As a result, although her film was compared to the New Wave most often in terms of visual style, the primary direct filmic references in her work are to other Québécois films, further reenforcing the coexistence of the local (cinéma direct) and the transnational or global (French New Wave) in La femme de mon frère. Filming Global Issues Having considered the (de)construction of spatial identities and (trans)national belonging, we turn to thematic considerations in both films, namely masculinity, womanhood, sexuality, and generational divides. Both titles, Matthias & Maxime and La femme de mon frère directly posit identity, relational dynamics, and gender at the center of the films’ narrative gravity. In the case of Dolan, the opening scene with Maxime staring at the billboard for “Le Pain Sainte Famille” and the point-of-view shot detailing a happy, white, bourgeois family of four having a picnic contrasts with the two friends in the car, whose relationship status is not yet known. The opposition between nuclear, traditional family models and more queer models is a classic trope in Dolan’s oeuvre. Yet to focus entirely on masculinity (in particular, heterosexual masculinity) is unprecedented. As Fulvia Massimi remarks: “Dolan has purposely refused to leave fatherhood and heterosexual masculinity at the center of his cinema […] paternal figures and heteronormative male subjects have been dislocated at the periphery” (2019, 32). Fathers remain absent in Matthias & Maxime whereas Dolonian mothers still play a part, but plot development revolves primarily around the two young men (and their numerous—straight— friends). For critic Sheila O’Malley, the film “is unabashedly about ‘the boys’ and how they deal […] with the stuff swirling around in their relationship” (2020). La femme de mon frère likewise sets the tone in the first few minutes by bringing together the lead, Sophia, her brother, and his future girlfriend (the gynecologist) in the same room. Sophia finds out that she is pregnant and seeks an abortion. The gynecologist points out that she has already had one before. Sophia responds: “Mais le premier j’avais dix-neuf ans, ça compte pas vraiment” [I was only 19 for the first one; it doesn’t really count]. Lisa Downing reminds us that the choice to not have children is still widely taboo, noting that “in some discourses” childless women are considered failures (2019, 105). This sequence is treated with the same humorous narrative style as the rest of

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the film and refuses to dramatize these events—rather it portrays them as facts of life which are common experiences for women everywhere— and marks an important representational turn. Indeed, life events such as menstruation, abortion, and menopause are rarely treated onscreen or in most cultural productions. Both films thus shed light on nonnormative relationships and identities that stray from social order, as well as the attendant struggles and stigma. A number of essays, novels, and songs addressing masculinity have proliferated in the past five to ten years in France, Quebec, and the United States, in response to the growing visibility of the feminist (and #metoo) movement (Bourdeau, 2020, 71). As such, Dolan’s film follows cultural developments and delves into the workings of masculinity among millennial men. We insist again on “millennial” insofar as generational identity impacts one’s understanding of gender (see Jablonka, 2021). There is indeed a difference between Matthias and Maxime’s generation and the younger sister, for instance, who shoots the triggering film. She does not quite understand why the young men are so reluctant to help her out and describes the synopsis of her short as such: “Two women. You’re, like, two women or men. And all of a sudden, bam! You’re kissing” (00:19:20). Matthias points out that they are two men, to which she responds: “OK, like, it’s kind of tricky, ’cause … for your generation, like maybe. But I don’t, like, use labels to define myself” (00:19:45). By bringing the two generations in contact, viewers see the social baggage that Matthias and Maxime carry in comparison to Gen Z-ers, who are the forefront of issues such as gender-neutral pronouns (Igielnik and Parker, 2020). Even as millennials, the Pew Research Center remarks, “remain the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals […] and more supportive of a progressive domestic social agenda” (“Millennials,” 2010, 3), they are still entangled in normative discursive practices and likely experienced traditional modes of gender socialization along with the stigmatization of homosexuality. Being looked at thus becomes somewhat overwhelming, especially for Matthias who exhibits fits of paranoia and thinks everyone is talking about him and the kiss: “It’s because of the fucking film … It was just a bet. It meant nothing to me” (01:16:00). It is unsurprising then that Dolan’s film includes so many shots of windows (and doors) that separate characters. Marshall has written about framing, emboîtement, and belonging in earlier films by the director (2019, 116). Here, we argue that the numerous framed shots are perhaps less about “construct[ing] multiple horizons of belonging”

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(Marshall, 2019, 116) and more about social restrictions as well as framing desire and the possibility of looking freely, free of the other’s (judgmental) gaze. These window scenes diverge from other recurring moments of loud sociality, fights, and toxic masculinity: “I don’t dress like a mini-gold faggot” (01:13:00). They give the leads a break. Indeed, by allowing either Matthias or Maxime—but especially Matthias, who is a control freak and has not looked directly at Maxime since the kiss—to look at the other through the window, Dolan enables them to feel their true emotions and desires. One might see here the specter of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which Dolan queers by subverting the male gaze. If in normal narrative film, according to Laura Mulvey, a woman’s “visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line” (1975, 809), the men’s visual presence in Dolan’s work and especially in the seeming scopophilic window scenes actually guides the story line and leads to a positive, albeit ambiguous, ending. At all times, Dolan comments on the restrictive social and binary gender order. Towards the end of the film, Maxime visits Matthias’s mother and finds an old drawing of two boys on a farm—reminiscent of Ang Lee’s 2006 Brokeback Mountain—that reads “Ferme des M. Matthias, 7 ans” [M and M’s farm. Matthias, 7 years old] (01:47:00). The friendship was unquestioned until that kiss made everything spiral out of control; until that kiss unleashed the toxicity of normative masculinity and the potential for new kinship. La femme de mon frère offers an original take on contemporary womanhood under the neoliberal social order. Downing argues that “neoliberal policies, such as the deregulation of the banks in the USA and UK, in combination with wage stagnation, has led to a housing bubble putting affordable homes out of the reach of many women who would love to live as the ‘individuals’ that neoliberalism promises” (2019, 8). In many ways, Chokri’s film dramatizes these issues in a comic register. Her characterization of Sophia as an unemployed academic in her mid-thirties is particularly noteworthy. The film opens with Sophia successfully defending her PhD thesis and the subsequent news that she is unable to find the work she had imagined upon completing her education. To make things worse, the new position that came up at her university went to the son of her PhD supervisor. As a result, she finds herself jobless with a student debt of CA$48,000 and is forced to take on low-paid temporary work in order to get by. With little or no income, she cannot afford rent and is forced to live temporarily with her brother and subsequently, her parents. At a meeting with a career advisor, she is told

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that she is simultaneously over-qualified and under-experienced to fill the available positions. Downing writes: “The stakes of female ambition and female success are so much higher—and the chances of them so much more fragile that they are freighted with judgment and precarity” (2019, 116). The film’s treatment of education, employment, and precarity thus places it in a global millennial context, while highlighting the ways in which gender (read: being a woman) alters and complicates these experiences. Sophia has had the opportunity to educate herself and follow her interests, but she has not been rewarded for it, perhaps because “women […] are supposed […] to be life-giving, to be nurturing, to be for the other, and therefore literally self-less’ (Downing, 2019, 1). Sophia is the antithesis of this model: she has abortions, depends on her family, and acts quite selfishly. To widen the gap between social expectations and Sophia’s womanhood, Chokri relies on surface-level gender stereotypes: most visibly, she establishes a recurring color palette of blue and pink from the beginning. Blue and pink objects, clothes, and backgrounds feature in several frames. Although they are stereotyped to the point of cliché, they clash with Sophia’s disruptive personality. As much as the color palette builds up normative expectations, she quickly and unapologetically breaks them down. The film comments on the nature of womanhood in two other ways. Firstly, it shows recurring imagery of femininity, especially on perceived notions of beauty and the wider objectification of women’s bodies in culture and media. When Sophia works part-time at a small art gallery, several of the paintings display heavily sexualized images of women whose bodies are objectified. Secondly, there are recurring images of Kim Kardashian. During one scene, Sophia is watching TV late at night and stumbles upon an interview with the three Kardashian sisters where they are discussing being on a hierarchal list of celebrities based on how attractive they are; they talk about it in a very matter-of-fact manner. Presented in this context, their conversation appears vain and banal to the point of meaninglessness. Later, when the American star comes up in conversation at the family dinner table, Sophia is incapable of explaining why Kim Kardashian is so famous to her parents, but remarks that she is just famous for being famous. A key to understanding the inclusion of reality TV in the film lies in Sophia’s doctoral research. Having worked on Antonio Gramsci, she understands the workings of cultural hegemony and social control by the capitalist class, which the entire film also exemplifies. However, understanding the concept does not make one immune to its (negative) effects. In any case, Kim Kardashian—an

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Fig. 10.2: La femme de mon frère

American woman of Armenian descent—represents a celebrated image of femininity that transcends geographical borders. To this end, Chokri makes use of the transnational nature of her image to comment on the notion of feminine beauty in a manner that forgoes any fixed sense of place. Conclusion In 2019, the Brooklyn Academy of Music curated a film series entitled “We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film.” The related website states that: “Though often characterized as entitled, shallow narcissists obsessed with social media likes and overpriced avocado toast, the millennial generation is in fact an extraordinarily diverse group whose lives— shaped by socio-political upheaval, economic recession, and dramatic developments in technology—are only beginning to be fully understood” (“We Can’t Even,” 2019). In literature, the millennial novel has likewise received much critical attention—for better or worse—thanks to a lively and rich production by writers born roughly between 1981 and 1996 (such as Sally Rooney, Ocean Vuong, Raven Leilani, and Édouard Louis) who feel alienated, lost, and tend to “depict a rootless, anxious life” (Sudjic,

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2019). Quebec’s cultural scene has not been impervious to such (generational) developments and has in fact proven an equally fertile ground. Le Devoir journalist Dominic Tardif often reports on this prolific scene of artists who seek to “Blow everything up, as in stepping outside of one’s comfort zone, as in disregarding conventions, as in shattering social norms” (2018).11 From Kevin Lambert to Nicholas Giguère and from Fanie Demeule to Karine Rosso, Quebec culture today demonstrates a clear commitment to diversity, inclusivity, to challenging the social order, and to giving way to new creative forms and forces, to shoring up new voices. In cinema, the focus on identitary concerns in conjunction with Quebec’s minoritized status in North America has perhaps undermined the millennial dimension of more recent productions. In this chapter we have shown how Xavier Dolan and Monia Chokri are two Québécois auteurs whose work is fundamentally shaped by their location while being part of transnational cultural networks of influence that owe much to generational specificities. As a final note, it is worth keeping in mind that the majority of contemporary Québécois filmmakers who have received international acclaim tend to be men: Xavier Dolan, Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Marc Vallée, Denis Côté. Although they offer progressive takes on social issues and depict rich and nuanced women characters—this is especially true of Dolan—their monopoly still comes with its limitations. Monia Chokri is thus a welcome voice in this cinematic landscape as she actually and effectively expands our understanding and vision of Québécité. Works Cited Baillargeon, Mercédès. “Romantic Disillusionment, (Dis)Identification, and the Sublimation of National Identity in Québec’s ‘New Wave’: Heartbeats by Xavier Dolan and Night #1 by Anne Émond.” Québec Studies 57 (2014): 171–191. Baillargeon, Mercédès, and Karine Bertrand. “Introduction: le transnationalisme du cinéma et des (nouveaux) médias: le contexte québécois.” Contemporary French Civilization 44.2–3 (2019): 137–150. Blasberg, Derek. “How Titanic Changed Director Xavier Dolan’s Life.” Vanity Fair (20 November 2015). https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/11/ director-xavier-dolan-on-titanic. Bourdeau, Loïc. “De ‘Pas comme les autres’ à ‘tous dominés’ dans En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule d’Édouard Louis.” Nouvelles Études Francophones 35.1 (2020): 71–85.

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Caron-Ottavi, Apolline. “La femme de mon frère.” [review] 24 images (7 June 2019). https://revue24images.com/les-critiques/la-femme-de-mon-frere/. Chokri, Monia. “La femme de mon frère – dossier de presse” (2019). https://distribution.memento-films.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ la-femme-de-mon-frere_DP.pdf. Cormier, Pénélope and Isabelle Kirouac-Massicotte. “Portraits et enjeux de la relève dans les littératures francophones du Canada.” @nalyses 14.1 (2019): 1–12. Downing, Lisa. Selfish Women. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre. Philosopher à travers le cinéma québécois. Paris: Hermann, 2018. Gott, Michael and Thibaut Schilt, eds. Cinéma-monde: Decentring Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Igielnik, Ruth and Kim Parker. “On the Cusp of Adulthood and Facing an Uncertain Future: What We Know about Gen Z So Far.” Pew Research Center (14 May 2020). https://www.pewresearch.org/ social-trends/2020/05/14/on-the-cusp-of-adulthood-and-facing-anuncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far-2/. Jablonka, Ivan. Un garçon comme vous et moi. Paris: Seuil, 2021. Joudet, Murielle. “Viens chez moi, j’habite chez mon frangin.” Le Monde (26 June 2019). https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/06/26/la-femme-demon-frere-viens-chez-moi-j-habite-chez-mon-frangin_5481540_3246. html. Lafontaine, Andrée, ed. ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Laurin, Danielle. “Dans l’univers de Xavier Dolan.” Elle (8 November 2010). https://www.ellequebec.com/style-de-vie/cinema-et-tele/dans-l-universde-xavier-dolan. Lussier, Marc-André. “La femme de mon frère: des torrents d’amour.” La Presse (7 June 2019). https://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/critiques/2019-06-07/ la-femme-de-mon-frere-des-torrents-d-amour. Marshall, Bill. “New Spaces of Empire: Quebec Cinema’s Centers and Peripheries.” Cinema at the Periphery. Eds. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. ——. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001. ——. “Spaces and Times of Québec in Two Films by Xavier Dolan.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Ed. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 101–118.

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Massimi, Fulvia. “The Transgressive Cinema of Xavier Dolan.” ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan. Eds. Andrée Lafontaine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 31–51. “Millennials: A Portrait of a Generation Next.” Pew Research Center (14 February 2010). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/02/ 24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/. Morrey, Douglas. The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 803–816. O’Mally, Sheila. “Review: Matthias & Maxime.” Rogerebert (28 August 2020). https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/matthias-and-maxime-moviereview-2020. Robinson, Ian. “Speaking across Borders: Xavier Dolan and the Transnationalism of Contemporary Auteur Cinema in Quebec.” Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. 24–41. Sotinel, Thomas. “Dans ‘Matthias & Maxime’, Xavier Dolan filme deux trentenaires à l’heure des choix.” Le Monde (15 October 2019). https://www. lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/10/15/dans-matthias-et-maxime-xavierdolan-filme-deux-trentenaires-a-l-heure-des-choix_6015514_3246.html. Sudjic, Olivia. “Darkly Funny, Desperate and Full of Rage: What Makes a Millennial Novel?” Guardian (17 August 2019). https://www.theguardian. com/books/2019/aug/17/what-makes-a-millennial-novel-olivia-sudjic. Tardif, Dominic. “Les nouveaux mâles de la littérature québécoise.” Le Devoir (29 September 2018). https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/537851/ les-nouveaux-males-de-la-litterature-quebecoise. “We Can’t Even: Millennials on Screen.” Brooklyn Academy of Music (2019) https://www.bam.org/millennialsonfilm.

Notes 1. “La relève littéraire québécoise serait si importante qu’elle est associée à tout un courant de la littérature québécoise actuelle; les écrivain.e.s de la relève s’inscriraient dans ce que l’auteur [Mathieu Bélisle] appelle l’ère des grandes explorations.” Translations from the French are our own except for film quotes, for which we used the official subtitles. 2. In a 2010 interview for Elle, Dolan explains that he would have liked to be an adult earlier, to experience the the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as well as the two referenda of 1980 and 1995. Asked how he would have voted, he answers: “Ça commence par un O” [It starts with a Y] (Laurin, 2010). See also Ian Robinson’s chapter on Dolan in Lee Caruthers and Charles Tepperman’s 2023 edited collection Canadian Cinema in the New Millenium.

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3. “Il y a des jump cuts, des effets de montage, une communauté d’esprit évidente avec le cinéma d’un certain Xavier Dolan.” 4. “Il commence par une version XXIe siècle d’un rituel que les films de Denys Arcand […] ont rendu familier: la retraite entre amis, loin de la ville, dans un chalet, au bord d’un lac.” 5. It bears noting that Dickinson played a closeted but sexually active gay men in Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017) two years prior. The character in Dolan’s film also offers an interesting form of “heterosexual masculinity”; while he goes to the strip club, there is a closeness with Matthias that borders on homoeroticism (especially when he seems close to climaxing and looks straight at Matthias instead of the dancer). 6. “monde qui existe par-delà ses frontières de plus en plus perméables, tout en demeurant forcément ancrés dans la tradition cinématographique, la politique et la culture Québécoise.” 7. Certain musical choices also recall the French New Wave. The use of strings-led classical music to pass between two sequences recalls the films of Agnès Varda, in particular Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) (1985). 8. Regarding Dolan, Pierre-Alexandre Fradet writes: “À l’image du Québec tout entier […] le cinéma de Xavier Dolan doit directement beaucoup à la culture populaire et indirectement beaucoup à la culture d’auteur” [Like Quebec (…) Xavier Dolan’s cinema clearly owes much to popular culture and indirectly to auteur culture] (2018, 164). 9. “J’avais envie de terminer le film par ce mélange de réalité et de fiction pour que ça décolle vers autre chose.” 10. “une musique excessivement démonstrative, des intermèdes de couleur pop pour lier les séquences, sans oublier l’hystérie qui peut surgir à tout moment.” 11. “Péter le cube comme dans sortir de sa zone de confort, comme dans narguer les conventions, comme dans pulvériser la norme sociale.”

Interviews

From Film School to the Big Screen: The “Quebec Label” in the 21st Century An Interview with Denis Chouinard Michael Gott Translated from French by Rachel Rider An Interview with Denis Chouinard MG: This book considers the 21st century, a starting point with two origins. On the academic side is Bill Marshall’s book Quebec National Cinema, which was published in 2001. Looking at films, your 2001 production L’ange de goudron seems like an important turning point in terms of representation of complex stories about immigrants from the Maghreb. Why do you think that the Quebec film industry has become more interested in this kind of story since 2000? In what ways has Québécois film become more globally oriented since this turning point? What is behind this?

DC: The referendum defeat of 1995, which saw Quebec miss the goal of its independence by some 50,000 votes, considerably displaced what had been the focal point of Québécois cinema for the previous four decades. Cinema, just like the artistic community in general, was at the forefront of the movement looking to bring this country into existence, which now will probably never be achieved. However, one may speak today of a post-national Quebec with an identity much less defined than it had been in the second half of the 20th century. Certainly, this affects the content of works created here. The national dynamic no longer being the same, we see a quest for new, unexpected horizons, and with them, aims and perspectives that would not have been imaginable in the Québécois cultural landscape. And that’s for

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the best. It would have been mortifying and masochistic to wallow in a form of nostalgia for the lost paradise. It was necessary to move forward, and that is what filmmakers and artists have done. Perhaps the country’s quest had been the tree that hid the forest, and you could say today that the filmmakers take malicious pleasure in surveying the new lands and in listing the different species of unexpected trees. We have discovered that Quebec—and not just Montreal—was a lot more mixed than it seemed. That the First Nations people preceded the arrival of the Europeans and that they had a say in the matter. The period that you mentioned also saw filmmakers from these communities, such as Yves Sioui Durand, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, and Tracey Deer, joining Alanis Obomsawin in the creation of an authentic Quebec Indigenous cinema. The same thing for the migrant voice that will have greatly increased its reach in the post-national discourse. The expression of minority experience told from the first person came to our attention by way of the cinema of Paul “Paolo” Tana—truly the precursor who should be recognized more, in my opinion. In his wake followed Patricio Henriquez, Pascal Sanchez, Ivan Grbovic, Bachir Benssadek, Marilu Malet, and Kim Nguyen. Therefore, we can see that the spectrum and the perspectives have widened quite a lot. However, this does not mean that these numerous voices have participated in a sort of atomization of the national conscience that would dilute the meaning of what we call “Québécois culture.” Today we discover that this Québécois identity is no longer the privilege of white francophones with European origins. The culture is much richer now, and it is our job to ensure that all these works participate in their own way in a sort of essential social cohesion for our survival as people. MG: In what ways has the industry changed since 2000? (Both in relation to the above question and in other ways?) DC: In my opinion, without a doubt one could say that the industry is no longer the same. And this transformation is not about to end when one sees the growing influence that social media and streaming platforms now occupy in the financing and distribution of cinema on the global level. This certainly influences the content of the films that are developed, here as well as elsewhere. But the real revolution came with the democratization and accessibility of the means of production in cinema. When I was twenty years old and I dreamt of making my first “true film,” shot on “true 35 mm film,” this accessibility did not exist.

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The horizon was completely obstructed at that time (it was the ’80s), and the only way to think of accessing the discussion that took place between a handful of established and aging filmmakers was to pass through the winding obstacle course of trying to find state funding. Because it must be understood that the “traditional” way of financing in Quebec is completely different from the United States where the private is dominant and the contribution of state levers is totally nonexistent. We are very lucky to have different sources of funding, dependent on state financing, which helps greatly in the development of young filmmakers. But in the ’80s, cinema was shot on film and had to be treated in expensive laboratories. Cameras were expensive, very few, and difficult to access. Today, everyone has a camera, and you can even do amazing things with a simple telephone. You can edit the film on partially free programs with your computer. The true revolution is there first. That is what permitted many of those hopefuls coming from diverse horizons to create works at a much lower cost and thus have the ability to express themselves. A good example of this could be the important work of Robert Morin, which he shot for the most part thanks to video. Accessibility and the lightness of equipment ensured that the entire production process of cinema became virtually accessible to everyone. Before, there was but a handful of those chosen, now there are many more. Well, having said this, this also brings its share of problems. Once four Québécois films would open in cinemas in Montreal in the same month, this created a problem of visibility, or more so of invisibility. Everything is drowning in a sort of overproduction where the quality is sometimes not there. But at least this allows the narrative to express itself, and that is more important, in my opinion. MG: Clandestins (Stowaways, 1997, Denis Chouinard and Nicolas Wadimoff, Switzerland/Canada/France/Belgium) and L’ange de goudron were made before a surge of interest in films about migrants and the process of immigration. The epilogue of Clandestins mentions that many stowaways who try to reach Canada do not live to tell their story—therefore in the film you seek to do it for them. Whose story or stories should Quebec cinema tell? DC: In the ’60s and ’70s, Québécois cinema largely focused on what the British called “Kitchen Sink Dramas,” or “Kitchen Films.” This cinema served to portray the average Québécois(e) (read: white and francophone) in his/her colonial servitude and feeling of alienation faced

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with English Canada and with its economic domination. The times have changed as well as the discourse. The creation of a certain wealth and access to higher education considerably opened the scope of the gaze well beyond our kitchens and often very far from the national soil. When in 1998 Denis Villeneuve created his first full-length film, Un 32 août sur terre (August 32nd on Earth), he struck our collective imagination by setting a crucial scene of the film in the American desert of Utah. Denis thus asserted his Americanness in broad daylight, and this did not contradict his feeling of belonging to Quebec. At the same time, André Turpin gave us a road movie between Montreal and Istanbul in his film Zigrail. We felt that the doors were in the process of opening and that it was no longer a sin to project ourselves into the world. That’s kind of what I wanted to demonstrate in my first feature film, Clandestins, that Quebec film does not have to take place in Quebec. We can talk about the immigrant reality of a group of individuals on a cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic and also talk about Quebec. It was necessary to broaden the discourse and be inclusive in defining the creative spectrum here. I realize how lucky I was to be able to create feature-length fiction films dealing with the immigrant reality of Quebec. This would be something totally unimaginable today. They would undoubtedly tell me that I have no legitimacy to portray this point of view, not being an immigrant myself. I find all this fragmentation of imaginations on the basis of blood and race to be totally deplorable. I think that humans, since the dawn of time, have disguised themselves and embodied what they are not. It is a characteristic of mankind and that is what makes our life more agreeable, less servile. I am deeply frightened by the idea that I will not be able to show someone other than myself by the end of my life. That I won’t be able to try to put myself in the place of another. However, this is what the prevailing intellectual climate pushes me towards. Now, having said this, I don’t believe that it’s up to us as a community to define what type of history or which subject Quebec cinema should broach. It is firstly up to the artist, to the filmmaker as an individual. Good ideas are born in the heads of creators. Next, as an effect of permeability, they spread and contaminate (positively or sometimes negatively) the creative psyche of the community in which this creative process is registered. Quebec cinema was born at the end of the 1950s with a flourishing period of documentary filmmaking. When the first milestones of our fictions were laid down later, the aesthetics and documentary approach remained very palpable in these works. It is even so today with ideas and styles. We spoke a lot about the “Quebec

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New New Wave” at the beginning of the 2000s, but I don’t believe this was the result of a coordinated effort. In Montreal, many great talents emerged within the space of a few years. The critics tried to lump all of that into a movement that really wasn’t one. The same thing happened in Iran and in Romania during the same time. All the better if these associations create an interest and allow the films to circulate and be seen by a much larger number of people. MG: I think that since Clandestins and especially L’Ange du goudron, filmmakers in Quebec have been telling increasingly diverse stories. Can you talk about some notable films or filmmakers that have taken on the challenge of telling these stories today? In what ways are the types of stories different today from when you made those films (origins of immigrants and refugees, processes of immigration and asylum, etc.)? DC: I am in a very poor position to see the influence that these two films have had on the work of my colleagues [MG: Bachir Bensaddeck talks in detail about this in another of the interviews in this volume]. And maybe it is still too early to try to define it in these terms. What I know is that the aspiring filmmakers who saw these films, those descended from immigration, felt that these topics could be broached and that they could reach other people in Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, or Matane. In other words, it should be possible for them to speak of their reality. If these films have one virtue, it is perhaps this, to allow others to go on stage and to highlight their perspectives, which are often very different from the stories of the majority. When I see Montréal la blanche (2016) by Bachir Bensaddek, and I see one of the main protagonists played with a lot of vigor by this young Quebecer of Kabyle origin (Rabah Aït Ouyahia), to whom I gave his first shot at acting fifteen years earlier in L’ange de goudron, I see a form of continuity. I also see, in a general sense, that the definition of the Québécois is now much broader and more inclusive than it was twenty years ago. It would be unthinkable to undertake the casting of a film in Quebec without including faces and names with diverse origins. It’s strange to think that when we created Clandestins and L’ange de goudron, we were the first to take such an approach. Regarding the immigrant experience and the way it is lived, it remains the same today. This phenomenon of uprooting, alienation, discouragement in the face of the bureaucracy is not about to disappear. What has changed is that the link with the bled is still present in the daily lives

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of migrants, via the Internet and social media. A migrant from Pakistan or Punjab who lives in my neighborhood of Parc-Extension experiences a very different integration than an Italian or a Greek who came to the same place thirty or forty years ago. Because he is in daily contact with his friends and family in Peshawar or Chandigarh. Whereas before this [connection] was more difficult to maintain because they depended on the post office and expensive long-distance calls. But the sentiment of the community is still very strong, and the immigrant is, in most cases, attached to the urban center because it allows them to hold on to certain points of connection with their community. I remember that the Quebec government tried to support the integration of several Vietnamese families in Gaspésie in order to counter this communitarian effect that is unfairly called the “ghetto” when migrants from similar origins gather in a city. This attempt failed in just a few years, and the families all returned to Montreal. So even if regional Quebec welcomes more migrants than ever, it is mainly in Montreal that this experience is concentrated, thus perpetuating a Montreal-region divide that is sometimes a source of misunderstandings. I grew up in a fairly homogenous environment, and I wasn’t really in contact with the immigrant reality before coming to Montreal to study cinema. That was a real immigration for me at first because I had never been in such a mixed community. Often, I was the visible minority. But rapidly I developed a sustained interest in the rarely banal life stories of my Montreal neighbors from all walks of life. Contact with the Other is important and should not be trivialized. In my case, it was the source of passionate reflections. MG: In addition to making films, in your position at UQAM [L’Université du Québec à Montréal] you also train a large number of the filmmakers and film talent who have come onto the scene in Quebec over the past fifteen years. What differences and changes have you observed over the past fifteen years? (And since your own training?) Do you notice that your students approach the types of stories that they want to tell differently? How do they see the world differently and represent this in their work? DC: One of the determining factors in the development of our cinema surely resides in the fact that Quebec, and Montreal in particular, possesses excellent cinema schools. Since I’ve been teaching at UQAM, I have had the opportunity to visit several places of training around the world, and I believe that we are lucky in Quebec to have such

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high-performance teachers and programs in the field of teaching cinema and the arts in general. Many people think that the practice of cinema is learned on the job and that spending three, four, or five years in an institution of higher learning is useless. I believe precisely, on the contrary, that it is a must for the vast majority of people who hope to make cinema their profession. There are many examples, often held up high, of autodidacts who have managed to make their way into the circle of great directors. But this is not the norm, and the training by cohort of groups of young practitioners who progress in their learning in contact with others in a collegial way, is surely the best way to succeed in this universal community that is cinema. I feel particularly privileged to be at the forefront of this development, and it is always with amazement and pleasure that I see these budding talents land at eighteen or nineteen years old in our halls, develop confidence and engage in fascinating reflections on the language of moving images. Over the years, I have also noticed—and this is normal—that my students stay the same age and that I get older. For me, an “old film” is one from the ’40s. For them, it’s a film from the ’90s! So, references change, and I must adapt. I try to see everything my students watch in the current film industry. That’s what is wonderful about teaching, that is forces us to look again at our way of doing and seeing things. Also, students today are much more advanced than I could have been at twenty years old. They all already have experience and several films on their CV. I had none because it was expensive and inaccessible, as I said earlier. Additionally, their learning is done on digital cameras instead of film. This generates huge changes in the practice. In my beginnings, we meticulously counted the number of feet of film used for each day of filming, and if we filmed more than planned, we earned a reprimand from the producer. This is why we prepared with care, and we did three or four takes maximum for each shot. Students today film without counting, even if it means exhausting the actors and their team. Sometimes, I watch their rushes and I often curse when I see them line up seventeen or eighteen takes of the same scene. This may be the biggest part of my teaching: to at least teach them to film and to film better. It seems simple when you put like that, but for them it’s a huge job of unlearning because it goes against everything they’ve done so far. Those who succeed grow out of it. And when they come to our institutions already with a good background, they leave even better than the students of my generation. Another important detail is that places in the university cinema programs in Quebec are limited. These programs

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are popular, and many hundreds of candidates apply every year. In the case of UQAM, there are more than 300 applications that we must examine, and the level gets higher every year. At the end of a rigorous selection process, only thirty students are kept to join our program. So, they are the best, and when we have all the best of them work together, we can only have good results. We also favor teamwork at all stages of the production, which pushes the students to appreciate the contribution of their comrades in each project. This helps give them all a good dose of humility. The student with an overly developed ego quickly falls back to earth. The themes have also transformed greatly over time. The themes of solitude, of mental illness, and of suicide always remain present in the catalogue of subjects handled, but to that the construction of identity, questioning sexuality, harassment, or even the role of family have been added. But these questions are now universal and are present in the student production in all Western universities. MG: How do you define Québécois film? Has your personal definition of what Québécois film is changed since you first began working in the industry? DC: Interesting question! For me, a Québécois film is a film conceived by Québécois people in key positions, namely production, screenwriting, photo direction, artistic direction, sound recording, and editing. If most of these positions are occupied by Quebecers, the imprint will be strong enough to classify this film with the “Quebec label.” A good example is the film Rebelle (War Witch, 2012) by Kim Nguyen, who was nominated for the Oscars in 2013. The film was conceived and produced by Quebecers, and it tells the story of a twelve-year-old child soldier in sub-Saharan Africa. We are far from the kitchen sink of a working-class Montreal neighborhood, and this proves that our gaze can reach far without being erased. So yes, this definition of what a Quebec film is has changed, at the same speed as society has. MG: How have the look and the aesthetics of Québécois cinema changed? DC: A lot. Young filmmakers were trained in good schools and could develop their cinephile knowledge. They are more at ease with the grammar of cinema, and this is reflected in the visual quality of their

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films and in the quality of their mise-en-scène. Also, technical learning has allowed the emergence of directors of photography who are just as good as the greatest national cinemas. The collaborations between Yves Bélanger and Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyer’s Club, 2013, US), Sarah Mishara and Maxime Giroux (Félix et Meira, 2014), or even André Turpin with Xavier Dolan were fruitful and were recognized on the international scene, thus helping Quebec cinema to acquire a certain status and acknowledgment. MG: The winter landscape of Quebec is so essential to the story and to visualizing the universe created in L’ange de goudron. Can you talk about why it was essential to make the film in the winter? In general, what do you think is the importance of snow and winter to the Quebec film aesthetic? In this book there are numerous films discussed that would be completely different without the snowy backdrop (Montréal la blanche and Le meilleur pays du monde by Ky Nam Le Duc [2019] come to mind). I’m also thinking about climate change and the impact that it might have on how Québécois films look. DC: For me, the film had to take place in winter. There was no possible question in this regard. It was essential for me to document this very particular relation that immigrants have with the cold. The cold season represents the first great shock that immigrants experience once settled in Quebec. It is this experience that marks everyone, and they keep it among their vivid memories. It’s a step, a necessary passage that marks them forever. Also, the film being built around several polarities (the son’s underground networks vs. the father’s work on the roofs, Montreal vs. the regions, the hot and the cold, the snow and the burning oil), including an image that kept coming back to my mind: that of Ahmed at the wheel of a snowmobile surrounded by snow, our Sahara. Several notable films take place in winter, one of the most famous is certainly Au clair de la lune by André Forcier (1983). A magnificent demonstration from this master of magic realism. I am pleased to see that several young auteurs also combine their films with this season that distinguishes us from many cinemas. Because it is certain that it’s cozier and more comfortable to film in summer. It’s also more economical because the days are shorter in winter and working outside in low temperatures is more exhausting for the actors and the teams. But it is true that global warming makes it more difficult to predict snow onscreen, especially in the south of Quebec. But we have a large supply of more northern

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latitudes where we should find snow for quite a few years. I say this without looking to minimize the importance of climate change, of course.

Transnationalism and the Québécois Film Industry An Interview with Bachir Bensaddek Kirsten Smith An Interview with Bachir Bensaddek

KS: You began releasing films, documentaries, and working in television in Quebec in the early 2000s. In what ways has the industry changed? How has the representation of transnational identities in the province evolved? BB: The industry has changed a lot, first because its inner structures have been shaken by multiple factors. First, by digital media, digital technology, and by the Internet of course, and its incredible growth and ability to become a new content provider. When I started, the Internet was just used to send written information. The biggest files we were able to attach were pictures. Everything was so slow, speed was not affordable so television was where you wanted to start in order to become a professional director (to make a living out of it without a day job) because it was the most powerful medium to reach wide audiences. And I have to say, when you made it to TV station executives who greenlit your project, you could consider yourself blessed. Their only leverage to help you get enough money from the Canada Television and Cable Production Fund was to invest a lot of money in your project, in order to raise your evaluation marks and increase your chances of getting a slice of the giant pie. On a provincial level, SODEC, which financed the film and TV industry, was more content-oriented. Eventually, the federal funding system was changed for something more practical for broadcasters and unfair for creators: the Canada Television and Cable Production Fund decided they would send a global check to each television channel which would manage their global envelope the

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way they wanted. The consequence was an increase of poorly financed projects waiting in line to be broadcast. Another aspect is that we didn’t have a lot of feature films produced in Quebec back in the 1990s. We had a few old-time directors, internationally recognized, some of them pioneers of the cinéma direct period, whose ambitious projects would literally suck up all the funding resources every year, leaving very little space for young directors to emerge. Until one of them stood up during the Quebec film award gala. André Turpin, holding his best director Jutra award, called for a change in the financing philosophy, asking for more low-budget films in order to have new blood and a new spirit. The 2000s were an incredibly dynamic period that helped us discover many emerging directors and writers whose combined creativity shaped a healthy environment despite the lack of money for individual projects. The only thing that didn’t change was the representation of transnational identities. There were very few behind the camera, even fewer in front of it. At the beginning of the decade, I sometimes felt I was one of the only “diverse” documentary directors of my generation. In feature fiction, there were almost none. I was often invited to discuss the topic at conferences, roundtables, symposiums … I only had one motto: immigrants have been a documentary topic for years, let them turn into filmmakers and characters so they can join Quebec’s national artistic discussion, so they can feel they belong here. Most TV characters and actors had a Euro background and somehow, a lot of people felt that Montreal diversity wasn’t fairly represented. The 2010s were a breakthrough because suddenly, respected Quebec directors like Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, 2010) and Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar, 2011), started questioning transnational identities, immigrant backgrounds, relationships between communities (Romeo Onze (Ivan Grbovic, 2011), Noir (Nwa) (Yves-Christian Fournier, 2015)), in and outside Quebec (Rebelle, Kim Nguyen and Inch’Allah, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette [both 2012]). Instead of documenting “diverse” realities, directors started dramatizing and writing film fiction. Progress was yet to be made on TV, but the Quebec movie industry was on a definitely more inclusive path and names like Onur Karaman, Maryanne Zehil, Samer Najjari, Moussa Djigo started to appear credited as feature film directors. KS: How do you define Québécois film? Have your personal views on defining Québécois film changed since you first began working in the industry?

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BB: A Québécois film may be defined as so when financed by Quebec and Canadian institutions, or written and directed with a Québécois point of view, or crafted by a Québécois crew, or even starring Québécois talent. If the film is about child soldiers, shot entirely in Africa like Rebelle but produced, written, and directed by Quebecers, it is a Québécois film. If an Ivory Coast Oscars bid is coproduced by Quebec (like Philippe Lacôte’s La nuit des rois/Night of the Kings, 2020), Quebecers will put the emphasis on their participation when the film makes it to the short list and some will claim the film is partly Québécois. On a more personal level, I studied and was trained in Quebec, and most of the funding that I have had to produce my films has come from Quebec. From that perspective, my films are Québécois, but I am also a Québécois filmmaker, even when my characters are from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and some of the scenes are shot abroad. I wouldn’t say that my personal views on defining a Québécois film have changed over time but the reasons are more precise. All our film production is government-funded, from development to postproduction. Our scripts are read and discussed by government clerks, analysts, executives. They know what we work on and hire professionals to judge our projects and send us recommendations when they are rejected. Even though we decide what we keep, or consider relevant, the process influences some of our choices and induces changes. Our films are influenced by institutions just like Hollywood films are influenced by the studios, and this leaves traces in our craft, our visions, and characterizes why a film can be considered Québécois. KS: Many recent Québécois films have been filmed abroad, or have been Canadian coproductions. Two of your films, Montréal la blanche (2016) and Rap arabe (2011), include scenes that were shot abroad; specifically in the Maghreb and the Middle East. What is the process of securing funding for these transnational films? What was the process like for your most recent film, Montréal la blanche? BB: Nowadays, when you finance a film and need to hire foreign actors or shoot abroad, you try to maximize your resources and sign coproduction deals with other countries from which you can have funding to be spent on their local talents or in their local economy. The result is that even though a film may seem to be Québécois in Quebec, you still can’t prevent it from being considered a little bit French, Mexican, or

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Australian when shown outside Quebec because what audiences (and marketers) look for is something to relate to. Rap arabe was mostly funded in Quebec and Canada but we had some Qatari money from Al Jazeera-doc because the topic and the characters interested them. The financing was secured by my Quebec producers who had ties with Middle Eastern channels and North African production companies, but we also had funds from TV5, an international French TV channel. As for the process of Montréal la blanche, it was a bit long. The writing took almost ten years and many versions with many genres and trials. As I said before, institutions act as a filter in film financing and we were refused three times before we had our funding, with sometimes contradictory criticisms and observations so I had to find my own answers to their concerns which ended up being better for me. During the writing process, I first tried to avoid foreign scenes because I wanted to stay in Montreal, because I knew I wouldn’t get much money to produce my first feature fiction. Then as time went by, I felt I needed an Algerian presence, in dream-like scenes that became a long flashback. Then I eventually had to cut the flashback and spread it throughout the film story to make it dramatically more interesting. When we got our funding, my producers asked me to try to write a version without it. I tried, but it was not as good as what we had before, so the flashbacks made their way back into the script.  A few years before the shoot, my male lead, Rabah Aït Ouyahia, had moved back to Algeria and become a TV producer. I begged him to come back for two months so I could film with him. His condition was that he would be the Algerian coproducer and take care of our shoot abroad. I identified locations where I wanted my Algerian scenes to be set and we agreed on a little city a few kilometers west of Algiers. And all of the sudden, while we were still filming in Montreal, he told me it would be better if we shot our scenes in Tunisia because Algerian censorship would ask us to change our script and would slow the whole production. This is how I ended up faking Algeria with a Tunisian crew, in Tunisia, but with Algerian actors. Our budget allowed us to afford three and a half days of filming, nothing more. We managed and made it work. I remember that I had a clear vision of how the killing scene should be, a subjective-like camera, from the killer’s point of view, which I considered a political statement because Algerians had been arguing for years about who was responsible for the 1990s mass killings whereas I was more interested on focusing on

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the victims and the survivors. When I got to Tunisia, I realized that some members of the cast were untrained nonprofessionals. I had to change something in order to make it look real. I found a miracle shot that would save us, our credibility, and the scene. I told my DP about it and he agreed. But then, while we were filming outdoor shots, we spent too much time on b-roll and I ended up having to speed things up and forgot about my miracle shot. The following day, I had to beg the Tunisian production manager and the location owner to let us go back to the little farm where we had filmed. It was one single shot, one movement, an outdoor dolly out, at night, leaving the house door on which I was projecting to sound edit the killing of our main characte’’s family. I remembered that what you don’t see is scarier than what you see, and sound effects are scarier than an untrained actor. I begged them until they accepted and I got my last shot. KS: On the topic of filming scenes abroad, landscapes and cityscapes play important roles in many of your works, particularly in Montréal la blanche. How do the depictions of landscape and/or cityscape play with the notion of the Québécois identity? Do you find that the representation of transnational landscapes helps to define Quebec’s role outside of Canada? BB: Humans shape landscapes and cityscapes, and they are also shaped by them. It works both ways. As for Quebec, the infiniteness of the landscapes and territories are part of people’s DNA, part of a founding myth starting with the First Nations. Colonization instead, brought cityscapes, directly inspired by European experiences and reshaped the territory, attracting immigrants who added their contribution to this reshaping. Today, Quebec culture is articulated by many dualities and oppositions. Native vs. European, English vs. French, immigrant vs. non-immigrant, and each one is expressed in our landscapes and cityscapes reminding us of a diversity of experiences and stories carried by its inhabitants. Some places you visit tend to be directly inspired by European villages, and when you cross some fields, you just can’t avoid thinking of Switzerland or England. When you travel up north, you get this feeling of infinity and it just reminds you of the First Nations who had a seasonal use for each part of the territory, fishing, hunting, gathering, and of course walking a lot with no known borders and, of course, you realize the extent of their loss of sovereignty. But for other people, French Canadians especially, it

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evokes the founding ancestors, trappers, and fur dealers who explored and colonized what would become their country. For me, filming landscapes abroad is just one of the many tools I use to try to characterize my project’s protagonists. A person can be easily understood and identified if she says she is North American, European, or North African, but showing her in her natural habitat is one step beyond because it just helps the audience to grasp a part of her physical experience, creating even more empathy. Of course, the depiction of transnational landscapes helps define Quebec outside Canada but it’s all a question of perspective because for some audiences, the difference between the two is hard to grasp, especially geographically speaking. Quebec’s role outside Canada is mostly cultural and its territory, even if it’s a part of its identity, tends to be assimilated to the bigger Canadian one. KS: Your film Montréal la blanche, and many of your documentaries such as Rap arabe and Enfants de la balle (2006), discuss the first- and second-generation immigrant experience and the growing arabophone communities in Quebec. Do you feel that the representation of Quebec’s diverse communities has changed since the early 2000s? Both onscreen and in the industry? BB: There is definitely a difference between the 2000s and nowadays when it comes to so-called diversity on- and offscreen. Ethnic minorities and First Nations were almost invisible at the time. Every decade had its native and immigrant fiction film when most of the stories onscreen were written, directed, and about Euro-descendant people. On the other hand, immigrants and First Nations were often seen in documentaries, used as topics and as characters to question Quebec society on a variety of issues. It was interesting to see that a new generation of filmmakers, some of them immigrants but not all, were willing to stand up and attract Quebec audience’s attention to new stories, new realities. A lot of these filmmakers were veterans from a TV show called La course destination monde, a weekly film contest that sent aspiring filmmakers abroad asking them to send one documentary a week. Philippe Falardeau, Denis Villeneuve, Jennifer Alleyn, Manon Briand, Hugo Latulippe, Ricardo Trogi, Maryse Legagneur, Karina Goma, Stéphane Thibault were among those who traveled the world and made us travel with their shorts. When they came back, they had this special awareness that opened new perspectives, pushed them to tell stories about communities whose countries they had visited. Some of them made it into fiction and

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kept on filming minorities, ethnic groups, turning them into drama characters, creating new opportunities for actors we had never seen onscreen. Incendies by Denis Villeneuve is one of the best examples because it hired most of the actors with a MENA background in Montreal. Slowly, we started seeing some of these actors in other films, TV shows, and new names appeared. Directors and scriptwriters from diverse communities started owning their stories and turned them into films, adding new voices and new talents to Quebec cinema. There even is an emulation phenomenon, attracting a new generation of filmmakers with an immigrant or First Nations background. KS: This book considers the 21st century, a starting point with two origins. On the academic side is Bill Marshall’s book Quebec National Cinema, which was published in 2001. Looking at films, Denis Chouinard’s L’Ange du goudron (Tar Angel, 2001) seems like an important turning point in terms of representation of complex stories about immigrants from the Maghreb. In what ways has Québécois identity become more transnational since this turning point? Has Québécois film become more global? BB: L’ange de goudron was definitely a turning point, first for Quebec audiences. Maghrebi people were seen in some documentaries, or news shows to discuss all kinds of topics about their countries of origin: politics, culture, religion. One Algerian-born actress, Karina Aktouf, starred in TV shows and films on a regular basis. I remember the first time I saw the poster for L’ange de goudron. It had the male lead’s name in big letters: Rabah Aït Ouyahia. I immediately felt challenged. It was the first time I saw an Algerian name on a Quebec film poster. I simply had to watch that film because it made sense to me in a very intimate way. I could relate to the main character’s origins. I could feel deeper than anybody else in the audience what he felt, the challenges he had, his back story, etc. … Filmmaking is about creating emotions thanks to empathy, projection, and with the help of a specific set of tools: scriptwriting, cinematography, acting, sound design, an original score. I was already empathetic, even before the opening credits started. This is something I have been hearing for years. Teenagers with an immigrant background found it hard to relate to characters onscreen (TV and films) before the 2000s because they couldn’t recognize themselves. L’ange de goudron didn’t change everything immediately but it started something new. Also, it was released in theaters in September 2001. The film wasn’t about international terrorism, and instead of having a young Muslim

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character attracted by jihadism, it was about an Algerian-born activist alterglobalist fighting capitalism and immigrant deportation while his parents were struggling to survive and hoping to become Canadian citizens because they had fled from fundamentalism and terrorism in their homeland. Suddenly, a Quebec film reflected something bigger than its frontiers. It was almost too early, too immediate to be understood because Western countries were still mourning the losses of 9/11 and couldn’t see that other populations around the world had been facing the same threat for years. Still, this Québécois film was global, and it wasn’t going to be the last one. KS: Québécois films have also become more linguistically inclusive since the days of National Cinema. Your films and documentaries feature Arabic (including multiple dialects such as Darija and Shami), French, and English, and it seems many directors have been employing multiple languages in their films to give a more accurate portrayal of life in Quebec, particularly in Montreal. Do you see other transnational aspects being represented in Québécois films in addition to multilingualism? How has the industry responded to the increased linguistic representation? BB: Filmmaking has always been about creating the illusion of reality thanks to lighting, set design, costumes, and actors, so the audience could easily believe whatever they watched. For decades, we accepted to watch French duchesses, Roman emperors, Russian composers, and Arab sheikhs speaking English in studio sets, sometimes with fake landscapes painted in the background, just because we wanted to relate to the big stars who portrayed these larger-than-life characters. Just like the rest of the world, the last twenty years brought a radical change in the Quebec film industry when it comes to transnational representation. Nowadays, audiences, like films, are globalized, mobile, and very sensitive matters. It challenges filmmakers to be even more credible in shaping their illusion of reality. They’re aware they can’t just do whatever they feel like doing when representing other communities. It involves research, education, consulting with experts, or just community representatives who can guide filmmakers on their way to writing and directing the film. The result is more accurate, more faithful to reality. It concerns language, accents, customs, accessories, jewels, food representation, clothing, history, facts. It is a fraught journey, on the one hand there is the danger of falling into stereotypes, clichés, on the other … The other

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is just business as usual, ignoring minorities and their stories. We’ve had gatekeepers for years, industry creators and producers who just decided enough was enough and embraced Montreal’s diversity, were willing to express it, to portray it, to film it. It involved hiring actors, sometimes complete beginners, sometimes nonprofessionals, but the will to change is still there and it’s not stopping. Montréal la blanche KS: Could you summarize Montréal la blanche in your own words, for those who have yet to see the film? BB: Montreal, Christmas eve and Ramadan, the Muslim fast, bump into each other under flurries of snow. Kahina, an Algerian-born music industry professional struggles to find a way to reach her ex-husband and pick up her daughter to take her to a party. Amokrane, an Algerian-born taxi driver breaks his fast while in his car, caught up with memories and recollections of his homeland that keep him away from his family (Editor’s note: Amokrane avoids being home for the holiday due to the painful memories). These two bump into each other too and suddenly their paths become one for several hours. Together, they confront their visions on immigration, family, homeland. Their journey takes them through the night waking up old nightmares and ghosts they thought buried under the Montreal snow. KS: Montréal la blanche began as a play you wrote in 2004, which discusses the life of Algerian immigrants in Montreal. What inspired you to transform your play into a film?  BB: I wrote a documentary play (commissioned and produced by Montreal theater company Porte Parole) after interviewing a lot of Algerian-born Montreal immigrants and then gave the play to a professional stage director, Philippe Ducros, who started casting and rehearsing while I was away in Europe. I only made it to the dress rehearsal. I was simply struck by it. I was the only person in the audience and the whole cast acted the play for me. For an hour and a half, I watched actors saying the words, lines I had been playing with for months. I had to take it further. The feeling was so magical, I wanted it to last forever. It did. It took me ten years to write and finance the film.

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KS: I was wondering if you could discuss the production of the film. It stars Rabah Aït Ouyahia as Amokrane, who played Hafid in Denis Chouinard’s L’ange de goudron, and Karina Aktouf, who has been featured in a variety of television series and films, as Kahina. How was the casting process? BB: The casting process was deeply linked to the writing process. As soon as I started writing lines, dialogues, I couldn’t stop myself thinking who was going to act in my film. The original play’s cast was largely of Maghrebi descendant but most were not born there and didn’t speak Algerian vernacular, Derja, at least not well enough for my liking. I had to find Algerian-born actors. I already knew one, she was perfect for my female lead and she was the only one in Montreal. This is how I chose Karina Aktouf, whose silhouette and profile accompanied me throughout the writing process for years. As for Amokrane’s character, it was more complicated. My producers had hoped we could hire a French star who would accept to do it for less money but we couldn’t even afford that. One evening, as I was watching TV, I saw a documentary I had directed, Seules, about immigrant women and disintegration, or unimmigration, meaning leaving the country they had immigrated to. The documentary soundman, who was also the onscreen narrator, was the son of one of these women. His narration was recorded one evening in an Algiers housing project, under a city light. It was Rabah Aït Ouyahia. I just realized the shadows on his face, its angles, the way the light hit it were so dramatic he didn’t even need to act or speak. That’s how I chose him. KS: Speaking of the characters, I find the name choices of the protagonists, Amokrane and Kahina, really interesting. Both are specifically Berber/Tamazight names, and highlight a particular aspect of Maghrebi culture. Could you go into a little detail about the name choices? How did you choose them? BB: I chose both names while I was working on my play. You have to remember that my play was inspired by real people, and the names I gave them had to reflect who they were, what they projected in terms of symbols, and last but not least, their dramatic function. In a very selfish way, I also wanted the names to reflect a part of me, of my roots. Amokrane means “the great one,” “the older one.” It is usually given to the first child in Berber/Tamazight-speaking families

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(more specifically in Kabylia, the part of Algeria where my father was born). I just thought that the taxi driver I had spent a night shift with was a great guy, because he had lost a younger brother during the civil war and he wasn’t hateful at all about it. He was full of love and I admired him for that. As for Kahina, she was a Berber queen who had fought the Umayyad Muslim troops led by ʿUqba Ibn Nafiʿ when they first tried to invade North Africa. My character was a Tamazight-language TV anchorwoman who had been threatened by the fundamentalist terrorists back in the ’90s and she had stood up when her colleague was assassinated. The name Kahina just came naturally to me. When the play was performed, I was invited to some community shows on the radio and I remember an open line during which a lady wasn’t happy at all that I had chosen Berber names because, according to her, it didn’t reflect all Algerians’ perspectives. KS: Montréal la blanche was mainly filmed in Montreal, but Amokrane’s flashbacks to his adolescence and early adulthood in Algeria were shot in rural Tunisia. How did you decide on the filming location? What drew you to portraying life in rural Algeria, rather than in larger Algerian cities? BB: The decision to film in Tunisia was taken for basic production reasons. My male lead, Rabah Aït Ouyahia was a TV and advertising producer in Algeria before coming back to Montreal to act in my film. He proposed to take care of the Algerian part of the production. Some location scouting had already been done and Algerian actors had also been contacted to play Amokrane’s family. But as the filming started in Montreal, I remember him coming to me around 3 a.m. (most of the scenes were shot at night) and telling me that our Algerian shoot was a bit complicated to organize, especially because my script evoked the terrorism during the ’90s. I was facing censorship and political concerns that would prevent me from having good production conditions. He suggested Tunisia because his partner had just been there to film an ad and everything had gone well. I decided to portray rural life in Algeria, or at least to film my scenes in rural landscapes because this is where most of the ’90s killings and massacres happened. It was in an area southwest of Algiers called the Death Triangle. KS: The film highlights the contrast between Montreal’s snowy landscape and the desert landscape of rural Algeria. Amokrane is particularly

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affected by the differences between the two environments, since the snowy landscapes and the roads in Montreal spark flashbacks to his life in Algeria. What inspired you to use these two contrasting landscapes? How did you decide to have Amokrane be affected by the flashbacks and not Kahina?  BB: I needed a contrast between Montreal and Algeria so both landscapes would be easily identified visually. Night/day, urban/rural, snowy streets/dusty hills. I needed Amokrane to feel like a total stranger in the Montreal winter, wearing short-sleeved shirts in his taxi even if it’s cold outside. I remember Rabah, my lead actor complaining to me that every morning, when we’d finish filming, he would have Algerian cab drivers driving him home and none of them would have short sleeves. I decided that Amokrane would be affected by flashbacks because he was the one refusing to settle, to admit he had left. Kahina had already been through this process and was done with flashbacks and nightmares. I wanted the film to be about the meeting of two people from the same background at different moments of their integration into their new country. KS: Music plays a central role in Montréal la blanche. The film opens and closes with a quartet of Maghrebi musicians playing Christmas songs on traditional North African instruments, the DJ/waitress at the Algerian restaurant provokes an important moment in Kahina’s storyline, and perhaps most notably, Kahina herself is a (formerly) famous singer and songwriter. How did you decide to have music play such a significant role in the film?  BB: I wanted to take some distance from the characters of the play. The anchorwoman character was too specific, I didn’t want people to believe it was her story in any kind of way. So I just kept her inner feelings, impressions, some of the initial lines, and built a character inspired by her but also by the tragic deaths of two Algerian singers, Cheb Hasni and Matoub Lounes, both assassinated. I thought a singer, not so famous, would still be recognizable by unconditional fans. It also allowed me to add a layer of meaning because the song she doesn’t want to hear is about a woman who lost her love. It’s a classic from the Algiers chaâbi repertoire, a musical genre between blues and folk in which poets can express ordinary people’s worries and stories. I also had this vision of a North African band, with suits and red fezzes on their heads, playing traditional music in the snow. My

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inspirations came from two German directors. Wim Wenders, the first, had used that process in Lisbon Story (1994), in which a fado band, Madredeus, played the film soundtrack live in outdoor or indoor sets. The second, Fatih Akin, used it Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), with a Turkish traditional group playing on the banks of the Bosphorus. In both cases, the bands were used to open and close the films’ chapters.  In Montréal la blanche, I saw the musicians as nonspeaking narrators adding a mood to the story, reflecting an older world. The funny thing about it is that throughout all the versions of the script, I had a short sentence describing the band’s outfit and an idea of the musical genre they were playing but I had never thought about specific songs. When we were given funding, my producer asked what kind of music they were going to play, and that’s when I replied it should be Christmas songs but done the Algerian chaâbi way. KS: Music is a subject you discuss in a number of your works. You also delved into Franco-Arabic music in your 2011 documentary, Rap arabe, which examines rap from various Arabic-speaking countries in the Maghreb and the Levant, as well as Arabic-language rap outside of Arabic-speaking countries. The music in Montréal la blanche is much more traditional. What led you to examine the transnational aspects of Arabic music, both in Montréal la blanche and Rap arabe? BB: In Montréal la blanche, the music refers to older immigrants who fled to France in the ’30s and used to hang out in what were called les cafés arabes or Arab cafés. They were strictly men-only and they used to meet to listen to traditional musicians who sang how badly they missed home. It needed to be traditional because in a certain way, they played in Amokrane’s head and expressed his nostalgia, his regrets, his longing to change the past. Chaâbi is really the blues. It may appear exotic and light to foreign ears, like “Ya Rayah,” Rachid Taha’s version of the Dahmane El Harrachi classic. I’ve heard it in clubs on every continent, with people dancing and shaking their hips to the rhythm when the lyrics are about a man talking to an immigrant who complains about exile, distance, and poor living conditions abroad. Cultural background really influences how we decode basic stimulations like music and I wanted to play with this aspect with Montréal la blanche, talking to several audiences whose reactions wouldn’t be the same listening to the music but whose understanding of the character would end up being the same. In Rap arabe, the purpose was different. I wanted to hear how MENA artists

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appropriated Western and Northern styles, beats, and sounds to express their concerns and reflect on their societies’ issues. I have to admit, I was not interested in second-generation immigrants singing messages I had already heard in French or English. I wanted to discover how Arabicspeaking youngsters managed to be conscious rappers in authoritarian regimes, how they coped with censorship, both official and societal. I just had the feeling these young people didn’t have a voice outside of their countries where dictators and terrorists were more visible than the ordinary, brave citizens who had to face hard living conditions or daily violence. As usual, life was even more imaginative than art, because while I was finishing the film, the Arab Spring started and suddenly young people in Arabic-speaking countries suddenly became visible, vocal, and to a certain extent fashionable. KS: Religion and tradition play unique roles in establishing the transnational aspects of Montréal la blanche, and are underlined at the beginning of the film: the quartet plays Christmas songs on North African instruments in the first scene, and we’re introduced to Amokrane as he discusses breaking his fast during Ramadan on the phone before a man dressed as a mall Santa enters his taxi. Could you touch on the overlap of Ramadan and Christmas in the film?   BB: From the moment I had the idea of adapting Montréal la blanche from stage to screen, I had the feeling it should be about traditions clashing but in a positive way. It began with the title: Montréal la blanche, in which both Montreal and Algiers, the white city, are both present. Then there was the research I had done during Ramadan and just before Christmas, filming tipsy people on their way to Christmas parties, driven by a fasting Algerian cab driver. It’s about West meeting East, North meeting South, Christianity meeting Islam, Ramadan meeting Christmas, tradition meeting modernity, Amokrane meeting Kahina, integration meeting disintegration, snow meeting dust. But there was also a dramatic reason for it: I wanted all Christians to be home celebrating, and all Muslims to be out (after breaking the fast, Ramadan is all about meeting other people in parties, evenings, events) in order to increase the probability of Amokrane and Kahina meeting in Montreal. It may seem trivial now the film is done but I thought it was very important while I was writing. KS: The dynamics between Kahina and Amokrane, and their differing perspectives on Algerian and Québécois culture, provide a deep dialogue

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on transnationalism and identity. Initially, Kahina refuses to acknowledge her Algerian identity and former life, while Amokrane struggles to find a place for himself in Québécois society. What inspired you to explore these two opposing viewpoints?  BB: Drama is all about contrasts, and opposing two characters’ viewpoints induces dynamics, movement, clashes which create interest from the audience viewpoint. When I began script writing, I was still influenced by the real people I had met during my research for the play. Amokrane was nothing like tortured or regretful, he was too positive, too nice to be a film character and Kahina, who had her own issues, seemed too passive because she just depended on him to solve her problem. I had to find a way to build bigger bumps in their relationship. That’s how I found the idea of Amokrane refusing to go home to break fast during Ramadan. I have to admit that Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was an inspiration too. Just like Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, Amokrane is pursued by memories of Ramadan that won’t let him rest until he finds a way to step outside the loop in which he feels trapped. Kahina is the one who provides the key to end this cycle of guilt. By confronting him on tradition, religion, and habits, she forces him to realize he does not live by Québecois rules and is not fulfilling his wife’s and children’s needs. Older immigrants are often seen as patronizing newcomers and it may seem annoying to be constantly told what to do and think to become a perfect immigrant, but in the meantime, a different perspective helps realize that we all go through the same struggles and evolution is not possible without sacrifice. Amokrane needed to sacrifice his past, his pains in order to keep up with his family’s needs otherwise he would have lost them, just like Kahina before realizing she had to face her own demons. KS: Montréal la blanche uses landscape to underline the characters’ presence in the city and their different perspectives on life in Montreal. Many of the shots, particularly the traveling shots, show identifiable areas of Montréal, like Rue Sainte-Catherine or the business district, while others take us through the outskirts of the city. Could you delve into how you chose the areas featured in the film? BB: When I started scouting Montreal neighborhoods to look for my ideal sets, I was hoping to find places that would be seen out of focus, as backgrounds in all of the taxi sequences. Each neighborhood should

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reflect a specific feeling to create a contrast with the action and dialogues inside the car. Popular streets with Christmas lights and happy people walking by were used to remind the audience that Amokrane was lonely, caught up in his wounds and traumas, millions of miles away from the celebrations. Empty industrial streets were used to create an empty canvas on which Amokrane’s and Kahina’s pasts could easily be reflected, projected, with no visual interference. I also wanted to explore less well-known places than rue Sainte-Catherine or boulevard Saint-Laurent, because that’s where immigrants live. We filmed some scenes in the Petit Maghreb or Little Maghreb neighborhood, where the stores, businesses, cafés, and bakeries are all owned by North Africans. That’s where I found the café we used in the film. KS: Another great aspect of the film is the transitory places featured. The majority of Montréal la blanche takes place in Amokrane’s taxi, but we also see Kahina’s office, cafés, restaurants, and a transit station—we only briefly see Amokrane and Kahina in their homes at the end of the film. I was wondering if you could discuss the role of these transitory spaces in the film?  BB: The film was initially strictly shot inside the car. It was a radical road movie with two characters clashing and arguing until the end. Film financing being what it is in Quebec, we get a lot of feedback during the development and writing process and when we apply for production grants, it is quite typical to be refused two or three times before being financed. Institutions need to justify why they refuse to grant our projects and send us reports from consultants who analyze our scripts and greenlight them or not. Throughout the applications, I had all kinds of feedback, going from “too many car scenes to be interesting for the audience” to “too many scenes out of the car to be consistent with the story.” To say it was a challenge doesn’t begin to express how complicated it was to be faithful to my vision and remain open to propositions. But still, I slowly understood that the outer world had to be represented and had to be seen so Kahina and Amokrane would feel challenged by their environment, creating stakes and drama, and thus evolution. Everytime they get out of the taxi something special happens and induces more possibilities, more movement, more progression. Everytime they go back to the car, they are loaded with more drama, new issues.

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KS: Both Amokrane and Kahina are parents with young children. While their children aren’t heavily featured in the film, they play important roles in the story: Kahina is searching for her daughter and her daughter’s father, while Amokrane is choosing to work during Ramadan instead of being with his family. Why was it important for you to highlight this generational aspect? It is even more prominent for Amokrane, as he occasionally has flashbacks to his life with his parents in Algeria.  BB: Immigrants are caught in a terrible dilemma. First-generation parents are the ones who remind us there is a past, a history, a tradition, a background, roots. Their children are the ones who push for change, progress, integration. I needed to express this because it was his inner struggle, his mission to find a way to cope with both his past in Algeria and his present in Montreal. Amokrane’s drama is every immigrant’s drama, accepting to evolve, to change in order to face new challenges and keep up with the society he lives in rather than with the one he left. It’s terrible, that’s life.

 n Interview with Marie-Hélène A Cousineau on the Arnait Trilogy Karine Bertrand Translated from French by the author An Interview with Marie-Hélène Cousineau This interview was conducted on August 11, 2021, in Kingston, Ontario. Marie-Hélène Cousineau and I spent two days at Queen’s University going through the boxes of Arnait’s archives and writing descriptions that will be translated into Inuktitut for the Elders. On our second day, we decided to discuss Arnait Video Productions and its trilogy of featurelength films Before Tomorrow (2009), Uvanga (2013), and Restless River (2019). Sitting right next to Lake Ontario, with the wind fiercely blowing and the sound of the crashing waves punctuating our conversation, it felt like, as is the case in the Arnait films, the landscape wanted to be part of the exchange. The interview also serves as a complement for Chapter Two in this book on the fiction films of Arnait.

KB: This year you will be celebrating thirty years of Arnait. When I look at the trilogy, I think you made very conscious choices, for example, to put women and children at the center of the stories. Is there a word, an image, or phrase that comes to mind that could describe what Arnait and those thirty years mean to you? What does Arnait stand for? M-H: I think it’s what it was at the beginning, which is women helping each other. This came from Madeline Ivalu and Susan Avingaq. KB: I love all of Arnait’s work. I’ve watched most of the films. I have noticed, in the three feature-length films, Before Tomorrow, Uvanga, and Restless River, that the themes of colonialism, the impact of modernity, intercultural relationships, and mixed identities are very present. Can you tell us about the trilogy and what makes it a unit?

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M-H: The three films explore the relations between the colonizer or the Western world and the Inuit at different times and different points in the process of colonization. They are linked in my mind because of this. In Before Tomorrow, we see the impact of colonization at the very start; you don’t even see white people in the film but you see what they have left behind, which is the infected needles and knives, as well as a certain “presence” because the women, as we are told, slept with the white men in exchange for these precious objects. The white men thus bring disease (smallpox) into the community and a horrible fate to the community, almost entirely wiped out by the illness. At the same time, you could see that the Inuit were interested in knowing about other people and they reacted differently, from one individual to the next, to the presence of these strangers on their land; one individual was suspicious, another was curious and wondered who these people were. I think it’s interesting to see how people are curious of new and different elements that come into their world. At the beginning of Before Tomorrow, for example, the child, Maniq, finds an object on the beach and brings it to his father and grandmother. They are curious about technology, as is Elsa (the main character in Restless River), who is fascinated by the movies and the technology that allows moving images to be projected. KB: On that subject, Restless River’s Elsa is not only fascinated by movies, but by all technology, which is something that is made clear in Gabrielle Roy’s book, which the film adapted. One of the reasons Elsa is so attracted by technology is probably because she has a child whose origins are not only Inuit but also white. What we see is Elsa feeling she needs to have this relationship with technology because of her child, as if it were part of who he is. M-H: Yes, that’s probably it. She is interested in Western clothing, for example; she wants a washing machine, she puts him in a playpen, and her son is interested in airplanes. So technology is interesting to explore, whether you are Inuk or not. KB: In Uvanga, which is set in 2013, technology has been adopted by the Inuit and the two main characters, who travel to Nunavut from Montreal, are there mainly because Tomas, the teenager, is visiting his paternal family for the very first time, and discovers a tradition he knows nothing about. Here, the relationship between tradition and technology

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is very different from the two other films, because, as we have said, it has been fully integrated. M-H: Exactly. The movie starts with the characters disembarking from a plane, so right from the beginning, we can see the evolution, from Before Tomorrow, where we barely see knives and needles, to Restless River, where the objects are still a curiosity and a source of suspicion for many Inuit, and then Uvanga, where they are part of everyday life. Moreover, in Restless River, Jimmy (Elsa’s son) is sick and the young woman knows that the only way to help him is through modern medicine and taking him to the hospital. The uncle (Ian), who is much against technology, also caves in, realizing that Jimmy will die without medicine. The scene where he is in the hospital, clearly feeling awkward about being there, is the moment where he becomes conscious that the traditional way of life is no longer enough to save this child. KB: Coming back to Restless River, why did you want to adapt this book into a film? M-H: It’s funny because I didn’t know Gabrielle Roy went up north. Ten years ago, I was at the airport and I saw the book in English, Windflower, so I bought it and I just left it on my shelf for years. One night I couldn’t sleep so I took it and spent all night reading it. I found the book to be very descriptive and full of love for the characters; it’s full of compassion and understanding. I thought, this is amazing! Just reading the book, I saw the film; that’s how great the writing is. I found the book in French and discovered that there were also other—very funny—stories in the French edition. I am sure that those stories were told to Gabrielle Roy, including Elsa’s story. I know this because I asked people in Kuujjuaq: “Is it true that there was this woman who was assaulted by a soldier?” and people showed me where the assault happened, by the river. There are still stories about it. Kuujjuaq is a town with many people of mixed heritage, Inuit, Naskapi, and white people. People from Labrador, Newfoundland, and Quebec. That’s part of their heritage. Gabrielle Roy wrote a lot of stories presenting portraits of women. She was a journalist first. She went to those places and talked to these women and wrote their stories. That’s what she did in Kuujjuaq. People up north had read the story in school. I went to Iqaluit and spoke about the summary I had written to Madeline. There are so many truths, but the way it’s put together makes for an interesting narrative.

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KB: I would say that the representations of Elsa in the book and then in the film are one of the things that stood out for me. In the novel, Elsa becomes bitter after Jimmy’s departure from the north, and she falls apart, which we don’t see in the film. Can you tell us more about the character of Elsa and why you chose to depict her as a headstrong, capable woman? M-H: This is something that was done with Malaya (who plays Elsa). I asked her to read the book and to tell me how she wanted to portray Elsa. She didn’t want this woman to be a victim. I wasn’t comfortable with the way she was written, in a very 1970s way. Also, for all the respect I have for Gabrielle Roy, she only spent a week in Kuujjuaq, so what she saw was the loss—the loss of culture, etc. All this loss can be felt through the written character of Elsa, whose story is a tragedy in the book. She loses her culture, her son, but also her innocence. In the film, the character is more nuanced, able to make decisions and choose who and what has an influence on her. Despite her assault, she is able to move on and make a life for herself and her child. The film was made at the time of the Inquiry about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and it felt like we couldn’t portray Indigenous women as victims. First of all, yes, they are victims of certain things (due to colonialism) but we also know how strong they are, how creative they are, how resilient, and that’s why I have been working with them for thirty years. Madeline and Susan, Malaya and Lucy are interesting and creative women; that is part of the culture. Imagining that they are just victims and dying—that’s what we learned in school—it’s not the truth, obviously. We wanted to show this perspective in the film. KB: On that note, one of the most obvious parallels we can note in the film is the one between Elsa and the Koksoak River. The river is strong and beautiful; sometimes it’s calm and other times it is powerful, just like Elsa. There seems to be this strong connection between the two of them. M-H: Yes. The Restless River is the main character and we wanted it to be visible. It’s water, it’s life and the seasons changing. At different moments in the film we show this: when Elsa gives birth to Jimmy and the river flows freely, after her assault, and when she crosses the river with her dad. It’s always there. It’s also always there in the life of the people of Kuujjuaq, because they were living on the other side of the

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river in Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq). They moved to the other side of the river where the American Army base was. People don’t really talk about the fact that the north started as forts and how the military, police, religion, and trading posts were stationed there. I met with a woman doing a Ph.D. on the occupation of Indigenous land by the army and how people reoccupy this land. We discussed Fort Chimo and the fact that there was an American base with 5,000 soldiers there. There were probably 100 Inuit in Kuujjuaq so it was mostly Americans that were living there for a short time. When you go looking for information it’s very hard to find. When they left, the Canadians took over the base, and what I heard from the Inuit is that they liked it better when the Americans were there, because they shared more than the Canadians. They had more positive memories of the Americans than the Canadians. KB: How do people up north react to the films you make? What kind of comments are made? M-H: For me personally it’s always interesting to see the reaction of the Inuit, because they won’t have a big reaction and say, “Oh how wonderful!” We are trying to make films in a respectful way and we are not misrepresenting them; it’s close to the realities they live. The reactions are subtler; people will come and shake hands, they will discuss it on social media, but they won’t ask questions during the Q&A. It’s mostly long-term: people will recognize the actors and meet them and people will talk about it for years. They won’t have a big, spontaneous reaction. KB: What’s coming up for Arnait in the future? Are there any projects the collective is working on right now? M-H: I am going to Igloolik soon so we’ll see! For sure the archival material (digitizing the work) is something that’s important to do. Madeline and Susan are almost seventy-five years old and they are tired. I don’t think they are about to embark on a new feature film project because their physical health will not allow them to do that. I think right now they are more interested in sharing what they have done. That’s why the digitized archive material is a good way to share with other generations; making a film is too demanding physically. We are perhaps developing a project with the National Film Board right now. It’s our first time collaborating with them. We will be making a documentary

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about food insecurity and Malaya Qarniq Chapman, Lucy Tulugarjuk, and I will be involved. Finally, we will try to celebrate the thirty years of Arnait later this fall; looking back and maybe organizing workshops with you [at Queen’s]. We’ll see!

Contributors Contributors

Editors Michael Gott is Professor of French and Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is author of Screen Borders: From Calais to Cinéma-monde (Manchester University Press, 2023) and FrenchLanguage Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and “New Europe” (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and co-edited Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Intellect Press, 2013), East, West and Centre: Reframing European Cinema Since 1989 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and ReFocus: The Films of Rachid Bouchareb (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). He has also published articles and book chapters on francophone, Belgian, African, and Eastern European cinema. Thibaut Schilt is Professor of French & Francophone Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in francophone and European cinema, gender & sexuality studies, and French language and culture. He is the author of the monograph François Ozon (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and two volumes co-edited with Michael Gott, Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Intellect Press, 2013) and Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He has also published articles and book chapters on French-language road movies, queer cinema, and Quebec filmmaking.

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Authors Mercédès Baillargeon is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research focuses on the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury first-person narrative, the intersection between public/private spaces and discourses, and the (de)construction of personal and/or collective identities. She is the author of Le personnel est politique: médias, esthétique et politique de l’autofiction chez Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume et Nelly Arcan (Purdue University Press, 2019) as well as the co-editor of a collection of essays on third-wave feminism in Quebec, Remous, ressacs et dérivations autour de la troisième vague féministe (Éditions du Remue-ménage, 2011). She has also co-edited, along with Karine Bertrand, a special issue of the journal Contemporary French Civilization on “The Transnationalism of Québec Cinema and (New) Media” (2019) as well as a special issue of the journal Nouvelles Vues: revue sur les pratiques, les théories et et l’histoire du cinéma au Québec on “Intercultural Encounters” (2022). Her most recent research explores the question of (post/trans)nationalism in Quebec cinema of the new millennium. Karine Bertrand is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Department of Queen’s University and co-director (with Florian Grandena, University of Ottawa) of the inter-university research group EPIC (Esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique). Her research interests are centered around Indigenous film and poetry, Quebec cinema, road movies, transnational cinemas, and oral practices of cinema. She is presently the lead researcher for one of the Archive Counter Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) on the Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women. Her latest publications include the introduction and an article in Nouvelles Vues, on intercultural collaborations in Quebec cinema (2022), book chapters on the rock group U2 (Mackenzie and Iversen, 2021) and on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) as well as an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) and an article on Québécois cinema and Américanité (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019).

Contributors

307

Stéfany Boisvert is Professor in Media Creation Theories at the École des médias (School of Media) of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research focuses on the development of OTT services in Canada, North American TV series, new forms of serialization, and issues of sexual/gender diversity in media productions. Her research has been published in journals such as SERIES International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Critical Studies in Television, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Télévision, and Quebec Studies. She also co-edited the book Une télévision allumée: les arts dans le noir et blanc du tube cathodique with Viva Paci (2018). Loïc Bourdeau is Lecturer in French Studies at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and formerly College of Liberal Arts Board of Regents Endowed Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2015–2022). His work has centered on cultural production in France and Quebec, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, literary criticism, film and care studies. He has published four edited or co-edited volumes— Horrible Mothers: Representations across Francophone North America (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), ReFocus: The Films of François Ozon (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture: Raw Matters (Lexington Books, 2022), and Diversity and Decolonization in French Studies: New Approaches to Teaching (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)—in addition to articles, chapters, and several edited special-themed journal issues. He is the founder and series editor of New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonization, Queerness (Edinburgh University Press). Peadar Kearney obtained his PhD from Maynooth University in 2023. His thesis concerns notions of identity in contemporary francophone cinema. His recent publications include a chapter in ReFocus: The Films of François Ozon (Edinburgh University Press, Loïc Bourdeau, ed., 2021). He has also written book reviews for Québec Studies and L’Esprit Créateur. He has also received prizes and bursaries from French Screen Studies and La délégation du Québec à Londres.

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Gemma King is Senior Lecturer in French at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on contemporary francophone cinemas and museums, specialising in the representation of multilingualism, transnational connections, colonial histories, violence, and social power. Her writing has been published in French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French Civilization, L’Esprit Créateur, The Australian Journal of French Studies, The Conversation, Francosphères, and numerous edited volumes. She is the author of the monographs Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2017) and Jacques Audiard (2021), a volume in Manchester UP’s French Film Directors series. Bill Marshall is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, having previously held posts at the Universities of Southampton and Glasgow, and served as the Director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is the author of Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (1992), Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity (1997), Quebec National Cinema (2001), André Téchiné (2007), and The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (2009). He has also edited books on Musicals—Hollywood and Beyond (2000), MontrealGlasgow (2005), and a three-volume encyclopedia on France and the Americas (2005). His current project is on the “Uses of Prehistory” in modern and contemporary French culture. Ylenia Olibet is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University. Her doctoral dissertation, completed at Concordia University, Montreal, examined recent practices and developments of feminist film culture that have emerged in Quebec during the past twenty years within francophone milieus of production and distribution from the larger framework of global media circulation. Her research has been funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et Culture, and she was the recipient of the Film Studies Association of Canada Gerald Pratley Award 2022.

Contributors

309

Julie-Françoise Tolliver is Associate Professor of world literature and cinema in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. Her monograph, titled The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures (University of Virginia Press, 2020), won the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2017–2018) and the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Award (2020). She is currently working on a project investigating uses of fire as represented in North American literature and film. Her work has appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, Women in French, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and the American Review of Canadian Studies.

Index Index

Note: The letter n following a page number refers to a note. Page numbers in italics refer to figures 3 histoires d’Indiens (3 Indian Tales) (Morin) 6, 70 24 Images (magazine) 18–19, 73 32 août sur terre, Un (August 32nd on Earth) (Villeneuve) 188 À tout prendre (All Things Considered) (Jutra) 69, 258 Abenaki language 46 Abenaki Nation 35, 44, 45 Abitibi 59, 61, 63, 129 Festival du cinéma international en Abitibi-Témiscamingue 63–4 Academy Awards 1, 2 ACPAV see Association coopérative de productions audio-visuelles action films 143–4 affamés, Les (Ravenous) (Aubert) 168–70, 169, 172–3, 174 Aird, Robert 157 Akittiq, Atuat 80 Aktouf, Karina 287, 290 Alexander, Jonathan 230, 237, 240, 241, 243 Algonquins 63, 73, 123, 128–9 Alioff, Maurie 211 Amina Profile, The (Deraspe) 105 amours imaginaires, Les (Heartbeats) (Dolan) 258

Andrews, Dudley 39 ange de goudron, L’ (Tar Angel) (Chouinard) 12, 20–1, 287–8 Angelique’s Isle (Cousineau and Derosier) 10 Antigone (Deraspe) 2, 13, 15, 18, 47–8, 103, 105–9, 108, 158 Apatow, Judd 148 Arcand, Denys chute de l’empire américain, La (The Fall of the American Empire) 2, 15, 253 invasions barbares, Les (The Barbarian Invasions) 1, 2 Archambault, Louise 94 Gabrielle 18 Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) 118, 125–30, 125, 134, 158 Merci pour tout (Thanks for Everything) 158 archetypes 142, 148–9 Arctic 8, 30, 41, 42, 80, 85 Arnait trilogy see Before Tomorrow; Restless River; Uvanga Arnait Video Productions 9, 41–2, 69–86, 299–304 Live from the Tundra project 78 Arnaquq-Baril, Alethea 73

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Arrival (Villeneuve) 190, 196, 199 art cinema 97, 98, 112n1, 168 Assemblée des Premières Nations du Québec et du Labrador 9 Association coopérative de productions audio-visuelles (ACPAV) 15 Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma (AQCC) 213 Atikamekw communities 75, 130, 131, 133, 195 Aubert, Robin acting roles 168 affamés, Les (Ravenous) 168–70, 169, 172–3, 174 Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés 168 Tuktuq 168 auteur films 14–15, 96, 104, 109, 142 autre côté de novembre, L’ (The Other Side of November) (Zéhil) 282 Avant les rues (Before the Streets) (Leriche) 6, 7, 9–10, 71, 75, 118, 130–4, 132, 135, 174, 195 Avingaq, Susan 71, 72, 74, 80, 86, 303 see also Cousineau, Marie-Hélène and Ivalu, Madeline Babysitter (Chokri) 2, 113n2 Bachand, Denis 6, 54, 64, 69, 192, 194 Bailey, Patricia 211–12 Baillargeon, Mercédès 5, 187–8, 227n2, 256 Barbeau, Manon 9, 195 Barnaby, Jeff Blood Quantum 7, 10, 174, 175, 176–81, 177 Rhymes for Young Ghouls 7, 175 Barnes, Michael 127 Batailles (Fontaine) 68n2 Battle of Restigouche (1760) 175–6 Baudemann, Kristina 180 Baudrillard, Jean 241 Beans (Deer) 7, 10, 18 Bee Movies 168

Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain) (Ivalu and Cousineau) 9, 79–80, 300, 301 Bélanger, Louis Post Mortem 30n7 Route 132, 21 Bell Media 157–8 Bensaddek, Bachir 281-97 and Dickens 295 and landscape 285–6, 291–2, 295–6 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 13, 46–50, 195, 283, 284–5, 289–97 and music 292–3 Rap arabe 283, 284, 293–4 Seules 290 on transnationalism 281–97 Berlant, Lauren 237 Bertrand, Karine 5, 7, 187–8, 256 interview with Cousineau 299–304 “Best Motion Picture” awards 18, 218 Bestiaire (Côté) 213–14, 215, 221, 223 Bhabha, Homi 171 Big Little Lies (Vallée) 189, 199 bilingualism 192–3, 195 Avant les rues (Before the Streets) 131 Bon Cop, Bad Cop 143, 144 Matthias & Maxime 252 Pays (Boundaries) 58 Bilodeau, Bill 139n10 Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve) 193, 196, 198–9, 199 blockbusters 3–4 Blood Quantum (Barnaby) 7, 10, 174, 175, 176–81, 177 Blumhouse Productions 168 Boileau, Sonia Bonspille 73 dep, Le 7, 16, 73 Rustic Oracle (Vivaces) 7, 10, 16–18, 73 Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Canuel) 3, 37, 61, 143–6, 145, 157–8 Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 (Desrochers) 3, 15, 146–7, 154, 155

Index Bonnier, Céline 3 Bootlegger (Monnet) 7, 10 borders 36, 64, 200 defining 37–40 ideational 45 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) 51–2 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 46, 47 Quebec 62, 128, 132, 135, 256–7 Uvanga 41 see also boundaries Boris sans Béatrice (Boris without Beatrice) (Côté) 219, 223 Bossé, Anne-Elisabeth 258 Bouchard, Michel Marc Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) 232, 235 boundaries 37, 48 and colonialism 7–8 colonie, Une (A Colony) 35, 43, 44–5 and identities 39 and language 56 and maps 38 see also borders; Pays Brady, Tara 234 Brain Freeze (Knafo) 180 Briand, Manon 3, 286 brom-coms 148, 149 Bûcherons de la Manouane (Lamothe) 20, 118 buddy films 143–4, 155–7 Bon Cop, Bad Cop 61, 143 and Hollywood 153–5 buddy-cop films see De père en flic (Father and Guns) Burelle, Julie 7, 17 Burrill, Derrek A. 148, 153 Butler, Judith 107 Café de Flore (Vallée) 15, 193, 194 Cahiers du cinéma (journal) 212, 227n3

313

Canada Television and Cable Production Fund 281–2 Canada’s Top Ten List 18 Canadian Screen Awards (formerly Genie Awards) 2, 18, 218, 227n4 Canuel, Érik Bon Cop, Bad Cop 3, 37, 61, 143–6, 145, 157–8 survivant, Le (The Outlander) 4 Caramel Films 15 Carcasses (Côté) 213, 214, 215, 216, 220 Caron-Otavi, Apolline 258 Carrier, Mélanie and Higgins, Olivier Québékoisie 20 Rencontre (Encounter) 20 Carrière, Louise 76 Carruthers, Lee 29n1 cartographic cinema 39, 62 Catsoulis, Jeanette 239–40 CBC Films 17–18 Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) (Pilon) 70 César Awards 2, 236 Cette maison (This House) (Charles) 113n2 Chapman, Malaya Qaurniq 81 chasse au Godard d’Abbittibbi, La (Morin) 22, 63 chat dans le sac, Le (Cat in the Sack) (Groulx) 21, 69 Chef de meute (Herd Leader) (Robichaud) 97 Chokri, Monia Babysitter 2, 113n2 and Dolan 258–9 femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) 2, 13, 113n2, 158, 250–1, 259, 261–3, 263 influences 258 and Metafilms 15 and Québécité 249, 255–9, 264 Simple comme Sylvain (The Nature of Love) 2, 113n2 and transnationality 251

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Chouinard, Denis 4, 271-80 ange de goudron, L’ (Tar Angel) 12, 20–1, 287–8 Clandestins (Stowaways) (with Wadimoff, Nicolas) 12–13 Chronique des Indiens du nord-est du Québec (Lamothe) 20 chute de l’empire américain, La (The Fall of the American Empire) (Arcand) 2, 15, 253 cinéma de femmes see women’s cinema cinéma direct 6, 19–20, 21, 69, 281 cinéma-monde 11–12, 92–3 see also transnational cinema Cinémaginaire 15 Clandestins (Stowaways) (Chouinard and Wadimoff) 12–13 Clark, Cath 68n4 classroom film 43–4 Colonelles Films 14 colonialism affamés, Les (Ravenous) 174 Blood Quantum 179 colonie, Une (A Colony) 60 and interculturality 74 Quebec 118, 119–20 Restless River (La rivière sans repos) 83 Uvanga 84–5 and violence 135 colonie, Une (A Colony) (Dulude-De Celles) 2, 6, 18, 22, 43–6, 45 colonization 76–7 Arnait trilogy 79 Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain) 300 and citizenship 44 and diversity 35, 43, 44 and modernity 84, 86 and nature 134 Quebec 73, 121, 122, 123–4 Restless River (La rivière sans repos) 300

Séraphin (Seraphin) 118, 120 and survivance 77 Uvanga 84, 300–1 comedy 142 De père en flic 2 (Father and Guns 2) 151 French 153, 163n17 and gender identity 154 and kinship 155 and masculinity 156–7 popularity of 153, 167, 255–6 Congorama (Falardeau) 12, 13, 21, 59 Conley, Tom 39 Cormier, Pénélope 249 Cosmos (Alleyn) 30n10 Côté, Denis 1, 209–24, 264 Bestiaire 213–14, 215, 221, 223 Boris sans Béatrice (Boris without Beatrice) 219, 223 Carcasses 213, 214, 215, 216, 220 and cinéma-direct 19 Curling 22, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217–19, 217, 221–3 and Dolan 216 Elle veut le chaos (All That She Wants) 22, 210, 213, 215, 216 états nordiques, Les (Drifting States) 21, 209, 210, 213, 215, 216, 220, 223 été comme ça, Un (That Kind of Summer) 219 and funding 223 and horror films 212, 213 Hygiène sociale (Social Hygiene) 210, 219, 223 international successes 216, 217–18, 219–20, 222–3 lignes ennemies, Les (Enemy Lines) 216 and Metafilms 15 Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives) 13, 213, 215 prizes 209–10, 216, 217–18 Que ta joie demeure (Joy of Man’s Desiring) 215, 219

Index and Quebec’s renouveau 211–15 and québécitude 220–1 Répertoire des villes disparues (Ghost Town Anthology) 218–19 Ta peau si lisse (A Skin So Soft) 218, 223 Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear) 210, 215, 216, 223 Wilcox 219, 223 course destination monde, La (TV documentary) 286 Cousineau, Marie-Hélène 71, 74, 299–304 see also Ivalu, Madeline and Cousineau, Marie-Hélène crabe dans la tête, Un (Turpin) 30n7 C.R.A.Z.Y. (Vallée) 171, 188, 189, 194, 197 culture clashes Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 294 Uvanga 85 Curling (Côté) 22, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217–19, 217, 221–3 Czach, Liz 1–2, 4, 146, 161n2, 223 Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée) 198 Davidson, Marie 257 De père en flic (Father and Guns) (Gaudreault) 3, 15, 149–50, 149, 154 De père en flic 2 (Father and Guns 2) (Gaudreault) 3, 15, 149–51, 154, 155 Death and Life of John F. Donovan, The (Dolan) 230, 238–43 Debruge, Peter 236, 238 Delivery Man (Scott) 15 Demers, Joshua Québexit 8 Demolition (Vallée) 198 dep, Le (Boileau) 7, 16, 73 Dequen, Bruno 18–19 Deraspe, Sophie 92, 94, 96, 103–10, 212

315

Amina Profile, The 105 Antigone 2, 13, 15, 18, 47–8, 103, 105–9, 108, 158 loups, Les (The Wolves) 22 signes vitaux, Les (Vital Signs) 22, 103–4 deterritorialization 30n7, 251, 252 Deux Pocahontas en ville (Dubé and Fontaine) 9 Dickens, Charles 295 directors Indigenous 174 male 154–5 women as 2, 8–9, 14, 73–6, 91–7, 158 see also names of individual directors distribution 15, 17 diversity 286–7, 289 documentaries 14 Chokri and 258 Chouinard and 274 Côté and 209, 214, 219, 223, 224 Deraspe and 103–9 forests 129 immigrants 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 293 Indigenous subjects 6, 7, 16, 17, 20–1, 71, 73, 74–5, 78–9, 176 Spira cooperative and 15 see also cinéma-direct Dolan, Xavier 1, 210, 212, 264 amours imaginaires, Les (Heartbeats) 258 and Chokri 258–9 and Côté 216 Death and Life of John F. Donovan, The 230, 238–43 J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) 216 Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World) 193, 230, 231, 235–8, 242–3 Laurence Anyways 97, 184n5, 230 and masculinity 259, 260, 261

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Matthias & Maxime 218, 250, 251–5, 255, 259, 260–1 and Metafilms 15 Mommy 18, 161n4, 230 prizes 230 and Québécité 251–5 and queer cinema 229–43 and Robichaud 97–8 Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) 231–5, 242–3 and transnationality 249–50, 251 donation, La (B. Émond) 21, 63 Downing, Lisa 259, 262 Ducros, Philippe 289 Dufaux, Georges and Perron, Clement 6 Dune (Villeneuve) 196, 197 Dyer, Richard 239, 241 Edelman, Lee 231, 237 Eder, Klaus 37, 51 Elle veut le chaos (All That She Wants) (Côté) 22, 210, 213, 215, 216 Émond, Anne Jeune Juliette 158, 212 Nuit #1 22, 94 ennui 227n2 Entertainment One 168 erreur boréale, L’ (Desjardins) 129 états nordiques, Les (Drifting States) (Côté) 21, 209, 210, 213, 215, 216, 220, 223 été comme ça, Un (That Kind of Summer) (Côté) 219 Europe-Latin American Coproduction Forum 14 événements de Restigouche, Les (Incident at Restigouche) (Obomsawin) 176 Everett-Green, Robert 169–70 Eye on Juliette (Nguyen) 18 Falardeau, Philippe Congorama 12, 13, 21, 59 and diversity 286 English-language productions 18

Good Lie, The 18 Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) 59–64, 62 Monsieur Lazhar 1, 2, 13, 15, 43–4, 59, 195 and transnationality 189, 282 Falcon Lake (Le Bon) 2 families Antigone 106 femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) 259–60 and identity 64–5 Inuit 78, 79–85 Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World) 235–8 Martha of the North 75 Matthias & Maxime 259 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) 54 Menteur (Compulsive Liar) 152 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 46, 47, 297 Nouveau-Québec 8 Uvanga 40, 41, 84, 85 Féminin/Féminin (Robichaud) 98, 114n11 femininity Antigone 106, 108 femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) 262–3 Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run) 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 feminist films 76, 92 femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) (Chokri) 2, 13, 113n2, 158, 250–1, 259, 261–3, 263 film festivals 91, 219–20 American Indian Film Festival 17 Berlin Film Festival 2, 113n2 Cannes Film Festival 2, 97, 112n1, 200, 216 Fema La Rochelle film festival 216

Index Festival du cinéma international en Abitibi-Temiscamingue 63–4 Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie 219 Lisbon Film Festival 218 Locarno Film Festival 216 Rendez-Vous Québec Cinéma festival 4, 17, 221, 224 Sundance film festival 2, 105, 113n2 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2, 18, 58, 105, 106, 112n1, 158, 215 Tournée Québec Cinéma festival 4 Wroclaw Film Festival 218 film production 14–15, 166–8 Films de Séville, Les (distribution company) 168 Films du Québec 30n9 fils de Jean, Le (A Kid) (Lioret) 192–3 fires 118, 119, 124, 125–9, 130, 131 First Nations 8, 63 characters 6, 8, 22, 70, 75, 81, 176–7 and diversity 286 and fire 130–1 and forests 118 Indian Reorganization Act (1934) 177–8 and landscapes 285 and masculinities 174 Réalisatrices Équitables and 113n3 reserves 35, 44–5, 68n3 temps d’une chasse, Le (The Time of the Hunt) (Mankiewicz) 173 see also Abenaki Nation; Algonquins; Atikamekw communities; Innu Takuaikan Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam community; Inuit; Métis; Mi’kmaq; Mohawk Nation Fontaine, Naomi 7, 75 Fort Chimo 303 see also Kuujjuaq Fortin, Virginie 156, 163n22 Foucault, Michel 231

317

Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre 267n8 francophone cinema 11, 92, 113n6 Freitag, Gina 167, 172 Freud, Sigmund 172 Frodon, Jean-Michel 216–17 Froger, Marion 85–6 funding schemes 14, 17, 284 see also Canada Television and Cable Production Fund; SODEC Gabrielle (Archambault) 18 Gallego, Carlos 197 Gates, Philippa 143 Gaudreault, Émile De père en flic (Father and Guns) 3, 15, 149–50, 154, 155 De père en flic 2 (Father and Guns 2) 3, 15, 149–51 Menteur (Compulsive Liar) 15, 152, 153, 155, 161n4 Gegen die Wand (Head-On) (Akin) 293 gender and comedy 154 and equality 95 and quota system 99 summer flicks and 153–5 see also femininity; feminist films; masculinity; queer cinema; women’s cinema Genetti, Stefano 233–4 Genie Awards see Canadian Screen Awards Giroux, Maxime 211 Goma, Karina 286 Gonzalez, Noémie 131 Good Lie, The (Falardeau) 18 Gott, Michael 48, 49, 54, 92 interview with Chouinard 271–80 goût de la farine, Le (The Taste of Flour) (Perrault) 70 Graziano, Manlio 37 Grignon, Claude-Henri Un homme et son péché 119 Grondin, Marc-André 171

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Guenther, Beatrice 46, 48 Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) (Falardeau) 59–64, 62 Gury, Paul homme et son péché, Un (A Man and His Sin) 119–24, 134, 135 Séraphin (Seraphin) 119–24, 120, 134, 135 Haitians 63, 69 Halberstam, Jack 99–100 Hall, Stuart 179 Hayeur, Isabelle 94 Heinrich, Jeff 196 heritage films 4, 167 Higgins, Olivier see Carrier, Mélanie and Higgins, Olivier Higson, Andrew 3 Hochelaga, terre des âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls) (Girard) 6, 8 Hollywood 188–9, 194, 196, 200, 241 homme et son péché, Un (A Man and His Sin) (Gury) 119–24, 134, 135 horror movies 167–8 see also affamés, Les; White Zombie Houde, Louis-José 148, 152, 157 Huard, Patrick 61, 146, 157 Hummingbird Project, The (Nguyen) 15, 18 Hunt, Drew 189, 198 Hygiène sociale (Social Hygiene) (Côté) 210, 219, 223 Ici Montréal (magazine) 213 identities 94, 259 and boundaries 39 families and 64–5 as fiction 235 and gender 102 Haitians and 69 Hall on 179 and historical figures 107 Inuit 84

Jewish 69, 256 masculine 144–8, 149, 150–1, 153 Menteur (Compulsive Liar) 152, 153 Québécois 5, 51, 64–5 see also national identity Igloolik (Nunavut) 8, 40, 41, 71, 79 Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) (Archambault) 118, 125–30, 125, 134, 158 immigrants and migration 5, 12–13, 19 Antigone 106, 107–9 Bensaddek on 286–7 colonie, Une (A Colony) 46, 48 conditions of 107 femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) 256–7 as filmmakers 282 and French language 11 Haitians 63 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) 51, 52–3 Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives) 195 Vietnamese diaspora 54 see also Montréal la blanche Incendies (Villeneuve) 1, 2, 13, 15, 188, 193, 195, 287 Indigenous actors 8, 16, 71, 73, 76, 84, 130, 131, 287 Indigenous cultures 77, 128–9 Indigenous films 6–10, 20–1, 42, 73–6, 174–5, 195 languages 8, 10–11 “Indigenous Other” 6, 44, 45, 70, 123 Indigenous rights 124 Indigenous subjects 69–70 Innu Takuaikan Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam community 43, 75 interculturality 7, 54, 64, 69, 74, 75, 79 internet 281 Inuit characters 6, 7

Index cinema 8, 41, 42, 71 and colonialism 77, 300 definition 30n5 identity 84 reaction to films 303 and technology 78 women 71, 77, 78–9 invasions barbares, Les (The Barbarian Invasions) (Arcand) 1, 2 Iqaluit (Pilon) 6, 21, 70 Irigaray, Luce 107 Isuma collective 19 Ivalu, Madeline 71, 72, 74, 86, 303 see also Cousineau, Marie-Hélène; Avingaq, Susan Ivalu, Madeline and Cousineau, Marie-Hélène 8–9 Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain) 9, 79–80, 300, 301 Restless River (La rivière sans repos) 9, 79, 80–3, 82, 300, 301–3 Uvanga 9, 40–2, 79, 84–5, 84, 300–1 J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) (Dolan) 216 Jameson, Fredric 166, 170 Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human) (O’Bomsawin) 20 Jeffords, Susan 145 jeune fille, Une (Martin) 22 Jeune Juliette (Émond) 158 Jewish identity 69, 256 Jonanette, Odile 73 Joudet, Murielle 257 Journal d’un coopérant (Morin) 70 Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World) (Dolan) 193, 230, 231, 235–8, 242–3 Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin) 17, 176, 195 Karaman, Onur 282

319

Kardashian, Kim 256, 262–3 Karetak, Joe 77, 78, 83 Kirouac-Massicotte, Isabelle 249 Kuessipan (Verreault) 6, 7, 9–10, 19, 71, 75, 158, 174–5 Kunuk, Zacharias 71, 86 Kuujjuaq (Nunavik) 80, 301, 302–3 Labelle, Antoine 120, 121 Laberge, Yves 144 Lacasse, Germain 214 Lafleur, Stéphane 60, 211, 214 Laforest, Daniel 36, 62 Lagarce, Jean-Luc Juste la fin du monde 236, 238 Lamont, Ève 94 Lamothe, Arthur 19, 195 Bûcherons de la Manouane 20, 118 Chronique des Indiens du nord-est du Québec 20 Mémoire battante 71 neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan, La 55 Lanctôt, Micheline 3 landscapes Bensaddek and 285–6, 291–2, 295–6 First Nations and 285 languages Abenaki 45–6 Antigone 106 Arabic 8, 10, 13, 49, 50, 188, 195 Arrival 190 Atikamekw 9, 76, 131, 139n15, 174 Avant les rues (Before the Streets) 131 Blood Quantum 180 Cree 8 and diversity 13 English 8, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 40, 49, 52, 54, 56, 81, 102–3, 144, 176, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 196, 200 French 1, 8, 10–11, 12, 49, 50, 54, 56, 102–3, 113n7, 122, 128, 129–30, 131, 139n15, 192, 195, 196

320

Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

Indigenous films 8, 10–11, 76, 81, 84 Innu-aimun 9–10 Inuktituk 10, 40 Mandarin 10, 18, 190 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) 54 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 49–50, 290–1 Pays (Boundaries) 56, 58 Russian 190, 197 Spanish 10, 13, 18, 54, 197 transnational cinema 196–7 Vietnamese 10, 53–4 see also bilingualism; multilingual cinema Latulippe, Hugo 286 Laugier, Pascal, Martyrs 167 Laurence Anyways (Dolan) 184n5, 230 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 165, 173 Lauzon, Jean-Claude, Léolo 69 Lavallée, Sylvain 221–2 Lavoie, Simon 212 Le Bon, Charlotte Falcon Lake 2 Legagneur, Maryse 286 Legault, François 11 Léolo (Lauzon) 69 Lepage, Robert 70 lignes ennemies, Les (Enemy Lines) (Côté) 216 Lionnet, Françoise 29n4 Lioret, Philippe, Le fils de Jean (A Kid) 192–3 Lisbon Story (Wenders) 293 Liste noire (Black List) (Vallée) 175, 188, 189 Listuguj 175, 176 Littoral (Tideline) (Mouawad) 13, 69 Locos, Los (Los Locos: Posse Rides Again) (Villeneuve) 188 Loiselle, André 4, 167, 172, 223, 234 Longfellow, Brenda 92

loups, Les (The Wolves) (Deraspe) 22 Loyo, Hilaria 200 Macerola, François 29n2 Mackenzie, Scott 8 Mackey, Eva 139n8 MacLeod, George 171, 174 McNamara, Tara 240 Maelström (Maelstrom) (Villeneuve) 30n7 Maillard, Florence 240 Maison de Prod, La (production company) 168 MaloFilm 168 Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s) (Pool) 3 Mandia, Valérie 242 maps and mapping 38–40, 64 colonie, Une (A Colony) 42–3, 44, 46 and families 65 Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) 61–2, 63, 64 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 46, 50 Pays (Boundaries) 57 Uvanga 41, 42 see also borders Marchand, Ève 168 Margulies, Ivone 93 Marshall, Bill 5, 195, 251 on cinéma-monde 92 on Dolan 249, 260–1 on mapping 39–40 on Montreal 253 Quebec National Cinema 29n3, 36–7, 117, 130, 144, 190–1, 249, 287 on “Québécois” identity 11 Martha of the North (Lepage and Flaherty) 74 Martínez-Zalce, Graciela 36 Martyrs (Laugier) 167 masculinity and colonialism 77

Index comedians and 156–7 De père en flic (Father and Guns) 150–1 Dolan and 259, 260, 261 and identity 144–8, 149 national 174 stereotyped 153 Massimi, Fulvia 114n9, 259 Mastropietro, Christopher 166 Matte, Martin 163n21 Matthias & Maxime (Dolan) 218, 250, 251–5, 255, 259, 260–1 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) (Le Duc) 13, 21, 51–5, 52 Mémoire battante (Lamothe) 71 Menteur (Compulsive Liar) (Gaudreault) 15, 152, 155, 161n4 Merci pour tout (Thanks for Everything) (Archambault) 158 Mesnak (Durand) 7, 17, 175, 195 Messiant, Manon 222 Metafilms 14–15 Métis 30n5, 178 Michael, Charlie 43–4, 153 Micro_scope 14–15 Mi’kmaq 175, 176 millennials 263–4 Miscevic, Filip 166 mobility 21 meilleur pays du monde, Le (The Greatest Country in the World) 53 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 48, 49 Mohawk Nation 16, 17, 176 Mommy (Dolan) 18, 161n4, 230 Monderie, Robert and Desjardins, Richard peuple invisible, Le 63, 139n11 Trou Story 139n11 Monite, Steve 257 Monnet, Caroline 19, 73 Bootlegger 7, 10 Tshiuetin 9

321

Monsieur Lazhar (Falardeau) 1, 2, 13, 15, 43–4, 59, 195 Montreal Algerian diaspora 114n12 Antigone and 103, 105 as a cinema hub 12 film production in 14, 190, 192 as a filming location 10, 30n4, 197, 199, 295–6 Hochelaga, terre des âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls) 8 language 102 Matthias & Maxime 253 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) (Bensaddek) 13, 46–50, 195, 283, 284–5, 289–97 Morin, Robert 3 histoires d’Indiens (3 Indian Tales) 6, 70 Journal d’un coopérant 70 n., Le (The N.) 70 Morissette, Stéphanie 168 Morrey, Douglas 257, 258 Morton, Erin 76 Mottram, James 189, 196 Mouawad, Wajdi Incendies 195 Littoral (Tideline) 13, 69 mouchouanipi ou le pays de la terre sans arbre, Le (The Land without Trees or the Mouchouanipi) (Perrault) 70 multiculturalism 7, 13, 48, 256 multilingual cinema 1, 8, 10, 11, 18, 106, 288 Mulvey, Laura 261 Muñoz, José 237 n., Le (The N.) (Morin) 70 Nadeau, Chantal 94 Najari, Samer 282 national cinema 3, 4–5, 18, 36 National Day of Canadian Cinema 17 National Film Board (NFB) 9, 95, 303

322

Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

National Film Board of First Nations 174 national identity 197, 200 Antigone 106 Avant les rues (Before the Streets) 130 Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) 59, 63 Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) 129 neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan, La (Lamothe) 55 Netflix 161n1, 163n20 New, W. H. 36, 38 New Wave films 175, 198, 257–8 Quebec 4, 19, 22, 103, 209, 211–15 Newfoundland 55 Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation 68n6 Newman, Kathleen 30n4 Nguyen, Kim English-language productions 18 Eye on Juliette 18 Hummingbird Project, The 15, 18 Rebelle (War Witch) 1, 2, 13, 15, 18 and transnational film 189 Night of the Living Dead (Romero) 173 nihilproductions 213 Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives) (Côté) 13, 213, 215 Nouveau-Québec (Fortin) 6, 8, 9, 19, 21 Nouvelle vague films see New Wave films Nuit #1 (Émond) 22 Nulman, Andy 156 Nunatinnit Mobile Media Lab 78 Nunavik 7, 8, 20, 42, 71, 168 Nunavut 8, 40, 42, 78 see also Igloolik Obomsawin, Alanis 6–7, 20, 73, 174 événements de Restigouche, Les (Incident at Restigouche) 176

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance 17, 176, 195 O’Bomsawin, Kim 73 Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human) 20 Quiet Killing (Ce silence qui tue) 16–17 Office National du film (ONF) see National Film Board oiseaux ivres, Les (Drunken Birds) (Grbovic) 13, 15, 18 Oka crisis (Kanesatake Resistance) (1990) 7, 176 Olivier Gala 163n22 O’Malley, Sheila 259 Orloff, Kerstin 174 otherness 5, 69 “Indigenous Other” 6, 44, 45, 70, 123 Ouellet, Rafaël 1, 211 Ouyahia, Rabah Aït 284, 287, 290, 291 Papatie, Kevin 74 Pascal, Marie 232 passion d’Augustine, La (The Passion of Augustine) (Pool) 3 Paul à Québec (Bouvier) 15 Pays (Boundaries) (Robichaud) 15, 55–8, 57, 98 pays sans bon sens!, Un (Wake Up, Mes Bons Amis!) (Perrault) 20 Perrault, Pierre 19, 212 goût de la farine, Le (The Taste of Flour) 70 mouchouanipi ou le pays de la terre sans arbre, Le (The Land without Trees or the Mouchouanipi) 70 pays sans bon sens!, Un (Wake Up, Mes Bons Amis!) 20 Perron, Clément see Dufaux, Georges and Perron, Clément peuple invisible, Le (Monderie and Desjardins) 63, 139n11 Pidduck, Julianne 229

Index Pilon, Benoit Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) 6, 70 Iqaluit 6, 21, 70 Pilote, Sébastien 22, 142, 212 Poirier, Christian 146 Pool, Léa 2–3 Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser’s) 3 passion d’Augustine, La (The Passion of Augustine) 3 popular cinema 141–58 definition 142, 161n2 and transnational film 153 Post Mortem (Bélanger) 30n7 Poulin, James Volkswagen Blues 21 Pour la suite du monde (Of Whales, the Moon and Men (Perrault and Brault) 20 Prescott, Robert 62 Prix Iris (formerly Prix Jutra) 18, 218 Prix Louis-Delluc 2 Pyne, Stephen J. 138n3 Que ta joie demeure (Joy of Man’s Desiring) (Côté) 215, 219 Quebec Algerian diaspora 114n12 bilingualism 192–3, 195 borders 62, 128, 132, 135, 256–7 colonialism 119–20 colonization 73, 118, 121, 122, 123–4 diversity 192 forest fires 125–9 foundational myth 119 French language 122, 129–30 industries 117–18 Maghrebi residents 68n5 as a nation 117 nationalism 102, 120–1, 176, 212 new territories of cinema 18–22 territory of 117

323

Québec Cinéma 4, 30n9 Quebec New Wave 4, 19, 22, 103, 209, 211–15 Québécité 5, 21, 51, 69, 172, 249–59 and Américanité 154, 251, 255 Chokri and 255–9 Dolan and 251–5 Québékoisie (Carrier and Higgins) 20 Québexit (Demers) 8 Queen’s University 72 queer cinema 97, 98 Dolan and 229–43 Quiet Killing (Ce silence qui tue) (O’Bomsawin) 16–17 Quiet Revolution (La révolution tranquille) 20, 171, 198 race classifications 177 zombie films 173–4 Racine, Daniel 223–4 racism 45, 70 Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) 63 Restless River (La rivière sans repos) 83 Rankin, Véronique 73 Rankin, William 39 Ransom, Amy 30n7, 163n23 Rap arabe (Bensaddek) 283, 284, 293–4 Ravary-Pilon, Julie 114n11 Réalisatrices Équitables 14, 94–6 Rebelle (War Witch) (Nguyen) 1, 2, 13, 15, 18 religion 85 Montréal la blanche (Montreal, White City) 47, 294 Rencontre (Encounter) (Carrier and Higgins) 20 renouveau du cinéma québécois see Quebec New Wave Répertoire des villes disparues (Ghost Town Anthology) (Côté) 218–19 RER FFWD (Villeneuve) 188

324

Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

Restless River (La rivière sans repos) (Ivalu and Cousineau) 9, 79, 80–3, 82, 300, 301 Rhodes, Jacqueline 230, 237, 240, 241, 243 Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Barnaby) 7, 175 road movies 21–2, 40, 48–9, 59, 195–6 see also Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre (My Internship in Canada) Robert, Marc-André 157 Robichaud, Chloé 92, 94, 96, 97–103, 110 Chef de meute (Herd Leader) 97 Féminin/Féminin 98, 114n11 and gender 98–9 Pays (Boundaries) 15, 55–8, 57, 98 Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run) 2, 97, 99–103, 101, 109 Robinson, Ian 189, 229, 239 Rooney, David 232 Route 132 (Bélanger) 21 routes en février, Les (Roads in February) (Jerkovic) 13, 22 Roy, Gabrielle La rivière sans repos (Windflower) 81, 300, 301–2 Rustic Oracle (Vivaces) (Boileau) 7, 10, 16–18, 73 Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés (Aubert) 168 Salinas, Altor 242 Santoro, Miléna 40, 144 Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Prefers to Run) (Robichaud) 2, 97, 99–103, 101, 109 Saucier, Jocelyne Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) 125, 139n10 Savard, Félix-Antoine 118 Schilt, Thibaut 59, 92, 190, 191, 195–6 sci-fi 193

Scott, Ken Delivery Man 15 Starbuck 15 Séquences (magazine) 211 Séraphin (Seraphin) (Gury) 119–24, 120, 134, 135 Séraphin: un homme et son pêché (Séraphin: Heart of Stone) (Binamé) 4, 161n4, 209 Seules (Bensaddek) 290 Seven Years’ War 175–6 Sharp Objects (Vallée) 194, 194, 197, 199 Shih, Shu-mei 29n4 Si le temps le permet (If the Weather Permits) (Isaac) 20 Sicario (Villeneuve) 196, 197, 200 signes vitaux, Les (Vital Signs) (Deraspe) 22, 103–4 Simon, Mary 77 Simple comme Sylvain (The Nature of Love) (Chokri) 2, 113n2 Simpson, Audra 128–9 Sirois-Trahan, Jean-Pierre 22, 211, 212 Sirove, Taryn 76 SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles) 4, 11, 14, 17, 40, 42, 95, 281 Sol (Cousineau, Avingaq, and Ivalu) 78–9 Soly, Arnaud 163n22 Sotinel, Thomas 253 Sphere Media 15 Spira 15 Starbuck (Scott) 15 stardom 239 Stenport, Anna Westerstål 8 streaming platforms 141 suicide 78, 84–5, 211, 278 Avant les rues (Before the Streets) 130 Death and Life of John F. Donovan, The 239 Il pleuvait des oiseaux (And the Birds Rained Down) 126

Index

325

summer flicks 141, 153–5 see also Bon Cop, Bad Cop survivant, Le (The Outlander) (Canuel) 4 Szaniawski, Jeremi 93

Tshiuetin (Monnet) 9 Tuktuq (Aubert) 168 Tulugarjuk, Lucy 71 Turpin, André 282 Turtle Island 7, 70

Ta peau si lisse (A Skin So Soft) (Côté) 219, 223 Tardif, Dominic 264 technology 42, 78–9, 263, 281, 300 Before Tomorrow (Le jour avant le lendemain) 300 Blade Runner 2049 197 and colonization 72 and mapping 38–9 and modernity 82, 83 and religion 47 Restless River (La rivière sans repos) 300, 301 Uvanga 85, 300–1 see also internet Telefilm Canada 17, 40, 95 temps d’une chasse, Le (The Time of the Hunt) (Mankiewicz) 172 Tepperman, Charles 29n1 Territoire des ondes (Boivin and Flamand) 74 Tester, Frank 77, 78, 83 Thibault, Stéphane 286 thrillers 233 Tia and Piujuq (Tulugarjuk and Cousineau) 10 Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) (Dolan) 231–5, 242–3 transnational cinema 4–5, 141, 187–9, 191, 196–202, 239, 241 Bensaddek on 281–97 women’s 92 Tremblay, Odile 162n8 Trogi, Ricardo 286 Trou Story (Monderie and Desjardins) 139n11 Truffaut, François 221 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) 89n1

UNESCO 69 Uvanga (Ivalu and Cousineau) 9, 40–2, 79, 84–5, 84, 300–1 Val d’Or 63 see also Abitibi Vallée, Jean-Marc 3, 187, 264 Big Little Lies 189, 199 Café de Flore 15, 193, 194 C.R.A.Z.Y. 171, 188, 189, 194, 197, 198 Dallas Buyers Club 198 Demolition 198 filmography 204–5 and Hollywood 196 Liste noire (Black List) 175, 188, 189 and music 193–4 and sci-fi 193 Sharp Objects 194, 194, 197, 199 and transnational film 188–9, 190, 191 Young Victoria, The 193 Vervaeke, John 166 Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear) (Côté) 210, 215, 216, 223 Vidéo Femmes 15 vie heureuse de Léopold Z, La (Carle) 22 Vigneault, Gilles, “Mon pays” 53, 55 Villanueva, Fredy 107 Villanueva, Patricia 107 Villeneuve, Denis 264 32 août sur terre, Un (August 32nd on Earth) 188 Arrival 190, 196, 199 Blade Runner 2049 193, 196, 198–9, 199

326

Quebec Cinema in the 21st Century

and diversity 286 Dune 196, 197 filmography 205–6 and Hollywood 196 Incendies 1, 2, 13, 15, 188, 193, 195, 287 Locos, Los (Los Locos: Posse Rides Again) 188 Maelström (Maelstrom) 30n7 RER FFWD 188 Sicario 196, 197, 200 and transnationality 188–9, 190, 191, 192, 282 Wild 199 Vizenor, Gerald 77, 85 Volkswagen Blues (Poulin) 21 Voyelles Films 14 Wadimoff, Nicolas see Chouinard, Denis Wapikoni Mobile project 9, 17, 42, 43, 73, 75, 175, 195 Warner, Michael 237 “We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film” (Brooklyn Academy of Music) 263

Wente, Jesse 175 White, Patricia 92, 93 White Zombie (Halperin) 173 Wilcox (Côté) 219, 223 Wild (Villeneuve) 199 Wilson, Shawn 72, 75 Witherspoon, Reese 199 women Arnait Video Productions and 299 as directors 2, 8–9, 14, 73–6, 91–7, 158; see also individuals’ names femme de mon frère, La (A Brother’s Love) 261–3 Indigenous 302 Inuit 71, 77, 78–9 marginalization of 153, 157 murder of 16 portrayal of 153–4 and positioning 55, 56 women’s cinema 93, 99, 103 Young Victoria, The (Vallée) 193 zombie movies 165–82 allegory in 166 production 166–8