“Why talk about you committing suicide? Why talk about you who had your skull smashed? Why talk about you who lost an eye? Why talk about you who lost your teeth? Why talk about your broken bones? Why talk about your bruised bodies? Why talk about you when there were thousands and tens of thousands of people in revolt in the streets? »
The massive student strike of 2012 left its mark on Quebec history. In the documentary 2012/In the heart, which will be released in theaters on March 31, and whose narration is provided by Safia Nolin, the two directors, Rodrigue Jean and Arnaud Valade, take the side of the street and the rebels. They document in an intimate way the violent face-to-face between demonstrators and police using a long succession of archive images filmed in a chaotic way by the militants on the front line. A sequence in which they insert, in a radical disparity, shots of smiling or feverish participants inside the Salon Plan Nord at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, or the congress of the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) in Victoriaville.
“This movement, which can be described as anarchist, or communist, or anarcho-syndicalist, does not exist in the Quebec imagination, except to show a wild beast that has no face and whose only goal is to break the windows, launches Arnaud Valade, 27, who also did the editing. But these people exist, they have a historic project and they carry these movements at arm’s length. Then, we don’t talk about them anymore, but they stay with the traumas and the repression they suffered. »
There was something new and a little extra-ordinary in the movement.
He was a student in Ve secondary during the strike. His brother, Maxence, who lost the sight of one eye during the riot on the sidelines of the PLQ convention in Victoriaville, was very involved, as was his sister. ” That [le documentaire] was never something personal or self-pity, it’s part of the collective experience,” he says.
The documentary was presented last fall at the Festival du nouveau cinema, where it received the People’s Choice Award. The proposal breaks with an emphasis on Quebec nationalism or student unionism, and instead carries a critique of colonialism and police violence.
“The idea is to report on the sensitive experience, underlines Rodrigue Jean, who also participated in the social movement. It’s to communicate the vital impetus of 2012.” “It’s all the more important that we are under neo-Duplessism at the moment, he believes. Many no longer see the possibility of political emancipation. »
Critique of representation
The project had been in the works for quite a while. The prospect of media coverage of ten years of the “reformist” strike and which “bury it in a movement that was only about an economic struggle” irritated the two directors, who wanted to present something else.
Media criticism is fierce. In the documentary, the work of portraying events by journalists — mainly from Radio-Canada television — during the Victoriaville riot is under the magnifying glass. The archival images obtained from the state-owned company highlight in particular the scripting of the presentation of information by the journalists before the airing.
“There was something new and a little extraordinary in the movement, believes Arnaud Valade. And the media weren’t equipped to talk about this kind of thing, they didn’t have the codes to talk about it. »
Here, a journalist from The Press accompanied by a video camera is answered curtly by an elderly demonstrator who has settled down next to a line of police officers from the Sûreté du Québec (SQ). “Why don’t you mind your own business instead of making news,” he told her. Another Crown corporation reporter stumbles over her words to describe the riot building and living before her eyes. She speaks of the terrifying Black Bloc “group” from Montreal and discovers, as tensions erupt, an unsuspected brutal reality as sound grenades explode near her and finds herself planted in the center of a violent extraordinary and chaotic.
Later, a spokesperson for the SQ will ensure in scrum of the press that a policeman attacked by demonstrators “would have been helping a citizen”. Images captured by the demonstrators instead show the policeman throwing himself at him in an attempt to arrest him.
“We wanted to show how there is a construction of what we live live, how there is a device that builds a story of things experienced collectively and emotionally, underlines Arnaud Valade. After having lived through the repression and the intensity in the street, we got up in the morning and, reading the news, we realized that the media reproduced the press releases of the police. »
Faced with a “false” representation of lived reality, a “rage against the media” and mistrust have increasingly taken hold, notes Rodrigue Jean. “They stayed,” he said.
With their film, the two directors want to keep alive the memory of the ecstatic experience of the street, but also of the repression suffered during 2012. “It is possible, here, to do that and to recreate that, thinks Arnaud Valade. It’s important that the youth or those who have experienced it see these images and feel what we have experienced collectively. »
A whole generation became politicized during this period, adds Rodrigue Jean. “We think that this generation has disappeared and that everyone is working, but, in fact, I think they are ready to return to the front, he believes. All it takes is a spark. »