On Wednesday, the winners of the Prix du Québec 2022 were announced, which will be awarded on November 30. The Albert-Tessier prize, awarded to cinema, goes to Mireille Dansereau, who should have received this laurel well in advance. A true pioneer! He was owed in 1972 in his twenties The dream life, the first fiction feature film directed by a woman in Quebec. Beautiful film, moreover, digging with its duo of young girls in bloom a furrow still little treated on the big screen. That of the female imagination shaped by the vain quest for Prince Charming. At a time when women were beginning to free themselves from the old shackles, these mental images anchored in the collective unconscious – still floating half a century later – already seemed very heavy. She tackled the identity of women and the absent father before anyone else. “I tried to send femininity into another dimension,” she tells me. Mireille Dansereau launched on the social arena new models of the couple, motherhood, creation and success.
At the end of the line, the filmmaker sighs, affirming to have fought throughout her career for a recognition not too much at the rendezvous. Young, she marveled at All things Consideredthe marvelous film by Claude Jutra, and savored the pages of The swallowing of the swallowed, by Réjean Ducharme, a pure song of freedom. After a long practice of classical, modern and jazz dance, her love of images threw her into the arms of the seventh art, another school of rhythm, discipline and sensitivity.
Initially, his short film me one day, presented at Expo 67, on a girl who flays father and mother, had served as his calling card for his admission to the Royal College of Art in London. His graduation film, compromised, with Tony Scott as cinematographer, won him the grand prize two years later. She dreamed of filming at home in French despite British proposals. Hence this dream lifedropped like an anchor back home, passed too quickly, ahead of its time.
The filmmaker of The Heartbreaker and of Deaf in the city, based on the novel by Marie-Claire Blais, has been refused various feature film projects over the years, including Eyes closedwith Michèle Cournoyer, on female fantasies, and A smart woman. ” It exists ? » had launched a merry drill to him.
She was isolated in a man’s world, coming from a bourgeois background in Montreal, a poor passport during the Marxist 1970s. “Yet my father had lost everything. I was able to study in London thanks to a scholarship. »
Mireille Dansereau will have dabbled in documentaries, whose hard-hitting I’m getting married, I’m not getting married and Forum, on the place of the artist in society, and also versed in cinematographic essays mixed with fantasy, archive images and animation. The filmmaker had tackled the haunting themes of the Aboriginal condition, suicide and immigration as a scout. But at the time of looking at her filmography, 27 films later, she says: “Without the English-speaking environment, where I felt welcome, I would not have existed as a filmmaker in Quebec. “Terrible observation! Male critics scoured his fine works. “We are afraid to see his next feature film,” wrote one of them.
Today, the lady who hadn’t managed to get hired as a permanent staff at the NFB looks back on her checkered journey: “I had to produce a lot myself. Otherwise, both men and women wanted to change what I was writing to make the scripts more commercial. Compromise is out of the question! ” Hardly reassured on her legs, a pig’s head as a lightning rod, constantly putting herself in danger, she always felt rejected by her peers: “Even my candidacy for this Prix du Québec was proposed by a person outside the middle of the cinema. »
The Cinémathèque québécoise devoted a retrospective to Mireille Dansereau in 2012. The fact remains that her title as the first director of a fiction feature film in Quebec will have long been denied to her, in favor… of a documentary by Anne Claire Poirier.
Then, in 2021, during a party for the NFB in L’Isle-aux-Coudres, feeling excluded from the assembly for moons, she had a heart attack due to stress. “They call it broken heart syndrome,” she whispers. Mireille Dansereau has gone up the slope.
The filmmaker is preparing to work with Karl Lemieux on a show at La Chapelle based on her archival documents. His heart ripper (not found) will be restored. But without a producer, it’s hard to finally achieve A smart woman.
His poignant sentence resounds in me: “I didn’t go all the way. His feminine blues comes from so far. How not to want to share the echo?