In May 2020, a week after it had sailed up the course of the St. Lawrence to Montreal, we remember, a young humpback whale was found dead. A few kilometers away, shortly after, fascinated by the marine mammal she called a “megaptera”, Martine Béland’s mother died after a long illness. These events are in his eyes a reminder “that death is in the nature of things”. What she does beautifully in Megaptera, a short meditative essay. An opportunity to revisit her “emotional geography”, from Saint-Lambert to Baie Sainte-Marie in Nova Scotia, where this Nietzsche specialist now lives, via Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse, trying to make sense of certain family silences “to say a past that we did not want to name”. She thus guesses what is no longer in the sand that makes up the beach on which she walks, and reminds us that death, even when we don’t want to see it, is everywhere and that it “is better to tame it “.
To see in video