Editor and committed citizen, the author taught literature at college; she is president of the governing board of a primary school and a member of the editorial committee of Quebec letters. She co-directed and co-wrote the collective work Shock treatments and tartlets. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
“We are poor. We all have used tanks. But we make films together! » In the crowded room of the Beaumont cinema, director Lise Bonenfant names the realities of women filmmakers with humor. In colorful leggings, she is lively, upright and as much supported by her cane as by the sorority of pioneers at her side that she stands upright. She is surrounded by the co-founders of Vidéo Femmes, Hélène Roy, Nicole Giguère and Helen Doyle. It feels like we’re meeting an old gang of friends.
It is now Friday September 15th. The Quebec City Cinema Festival (FCVQ) has scheduled an evening to mark 50 years of the creation of the collective for the production, distribution and broadcast of films and videos directed by women. I don’t know at this time that I will have many days to decant what I decided to see that weekend: works almost all created by women, including Sister & Sister by Kattia G. Zúñiga, Maidens by Fanie Pelletiert Simple like Sylvain by Monia Chokri. Powerful, intelligent, sensitive, accurate works that will shake me up. Films that we must give time to settle into ourselves, and which highlight the recurring question of the place of women in the arts, this time through the seventh.
During the discussion led that evening by Julia Minne, who is interested in the collective as part of her thesis, one minute is enough to recognize the heart, the talent and the hard work that these pioneers have put into their films in recent years. decades, sailing “from small grant to small grant”, emphasizing “all that it has brought us, all that it has drained from us, too”.
“My greatest heartbreak,” says one of them, when she refers to the exile of several members of the group in Montreal. The gratitude ? ” What is that ? We didn’t even know it existed! » The video was looked down upon. Films made by women too. Vidéo Femmes devoted itself to an unloved, snubbed combo, but which granted its members great freedom, the possibility of learning cinema by doing it and, also, of exposing realities little shown until then: domestic violence , AIDS epidemic, feminist theater, rape…
An important part of the history of local cinema, therefore, that I was unaware of before that evening. I decide, while the images continue to crystallize in me, to speak to Naomie Décarie-Daigneault, whose passion challenged me during certain post-screening plenaries. A director herself, she co-founded the Quebec branch of Tënk, a content publishing platform which aims to discover documentaries that defy the logic of “it just came out”. Including several signed by women, of course.
“No one was interested in this story; the institutions turned up their noses. But thanks in particular to Julia, who works at the Cinémathèque québécoise and who contributed to its digitization plan, things are changing. Until very recently, there was a whole corpus that did not exist, scattered in boxes, basements, which she helped to bring to light. Which also translates this whole aspect: who says what the canons are? How do we write the history of cinema? What is a masterpiece? »
A bachelor in cinema who graduated in 2011, the young director deplores having been nourished almost 100% on the works of men during her still relatively recent training… The student of course recognized formal qualities in the “canons” which were taught to her, but it is his meeting with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels which will act as a revelation.
“I discovered Chantal Akerman’s film by myself. I remember feeling breathless and being changed forever. There is something in the rhythm, the honesty, the radicality of the proposition which opened my eyes to what cinema could also be. I had the same kind of transfiguration with Godard’s cinema, but the women in his films are not at all treated the same. Suddenly, it was really having access to a testimony from a woman, who transcended everything, who spoke about our mothers, our actions, anguish, domestic life… It was something else! »
She then met Vidéo Femmes when she was looking for a distributor for her film. But then she is not aware of her history or her mission. “It was afterward, with meeting Nicole Giguère and my involvement in Realizing Equitable Directors, that I understood what it was all about! »
A ship… and its witches, by Hélène Roy, who immortalizes the first Quebec feminist play, hits her like a ton of bricks. She would like more men to see her. “It would open up parts of the imagination to which we don’t have access, it’s a decentring. We spend our time reading and seeing the imagination of men, we… There is, in the shadow of Citizen Kane, a lot of things that have not been taught. »
This brings me back to literature, to a certain discourse which, again, speaks of the work of Annie Ernaux as a “good woman’s literature” because it expresses the intimate, and to these artists erased from the ‘Story that Élise Turcotte tracks in Self-portrait of another…
Festivals are important places for media coverage of archives; the RIDM has already devoted a major retrospective to Vidéo Femmes. The more women’s cinema shines, the more flashes like that of September 17 are likely to occur. That day, director Léa Clermont-Dion won three Gémeaux. Soloby Sophie Dupuis, was named Best Canadian Film at TIFF. My ousted cityby Laurence Turcotte-Fraser and Priscillia Piccoli, received the Jean-Marc-Vallée Audience Award from the FCVQ.
But nothing is certain. After two women in a row being crowned at the Oscars for best director, none has been nominated by the Academy in this category in 2023. Not even Sarah Polley for her excellent Women Talking, yet crowned Best Adapted Screenplay. A not-so-gentle irony, which shows that institutions still need to be transformed.