“There aren’t many people who don’t have Indians in the family”, launches a bar owner, and owner of almost all the shops in Schefferville, in Mathieu (Jean-Sébastien Courchesne, all with contained rage) , an accountant whose predictable and reassuring existence will be turned upside down in contact with landscapes and people he knew nothing about.
What was he going to do so far from his bearings? It is this question that Sarah Fortin subtly addresses in New Quebeca first fiction feature film for the one who made her mark in documentaries (I’m going to come back, On the sidelines of world), combing a territory that she knows well, and that she adores.
However, this X-ray of a drifting couple is nothing like a syrupy love letter, except perhaps in the eyes of Sophie (Christine Beaulieu, an interpretation rich in nuances and emotions), amazed by the immensity of a territory that she left at the age of three. The daughter of an employee of a mining company that closed its doors in the early 1980s, the teacher has virtually no memory of the place, but she is eager to respect her father’s last wishes: let his ashes be spread on a land where he was visibly happy and appreciated by all.
Young couples are said to have their first argument in the aisles of an IKEA store; the older ones sometimes come back from a trip with fewer illusions. Those that Sophie and Mathieu will lose in what promises to be a simple symbolic getaway will be numerous, from the moment a tragic incident alerts the police and makes them suspect in the eyes of the majority of Aboriginal people in the region, except Jean- Louis (Jean-Luc Kanapé), an Innu who quickly becomes a true guardian angel.
This climate of mistrust will have unexpected effects in them. Sophie will begin a discovery of the territory with the appearance of an inner quest – and will find much more there – while Mathieu, worthy son of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, will gradually turn into being impatient, racist, obnoxious and paranoid. The gradual break will push the young woman to rake wide, especially in the company of Jean-Louis, and she will eventually understand the secret and disturbing reasons for her return. Not to mention that everything, or almost, prevents them from leaving: a police investigation that drags on for lack of personnel and a train rarely leaving on the scheduled day, or “God willing”.
In the middle of this quasi-lunar environment where the two city dwellers often pass for extraterrestrials dumbfounded by the exorbitant prices and the languid pace of things, the couple makes a kind of motionless journey, each going very far deep inside themselves while being captive of an ubiquitous situation. The gray skies, the muddy roads, the houses of which only ruins remain, all this is observed by the sometimes contemplative, sometimes agitated camera of Vincent Gonneville, who always keeps closer to this tandem than a single shot. rifle will gradually dislocate.
New Quebec starts with news footage evoking the end of dreams in Schefferville and the departure of mine workers reduced to unemployment. Then comes to mind the memory of the Last glacier, by Jacques Leduc and Roger Frappier, which at the time detailed this brutal closure. If the filiation seems obvious, Sarah Fortin is also part of a deep desire of Quebec filmmakers, of all origins, to turn their gaze to a not so distant but still unknown elsewhere.
The examples of this renewed curiosity are more and more numerous, and of great sensitivity (Tuktuqby Robin Aubert; Iqaluitby Benoît Pilon; Kuessipan, by Myriam Verreault, etc.). It is now necessary to add that of Fortin, observing a harsh and singular horizon, crossed by beings, some of whom are not ready for reconciliation. New-Quebec testifies with delicacy of this pain.