The excessively mild holiday season has reduced most outdoor rinks in Quebec to nothing, to the chagrin of Sunday hockey players, young and old. While waiting for the return of lower temperatures, fans of this national sport in a convivial formula will perhaps regain their enthusiasm for the season by watching this warm tribute to those who make outdoor hockey possible, often with “the means of the edge “. Director Guillaume Duval traveled to the Côte-Nord, Gaspésie and neighborhoods of Montreal to meet the courageous people who maintain outdoor skating rinks, improvised or very organized, and others who help to animate these places that create small rivalries, and great solidarities.
Thus, he leaves to men of few words, Serge and Sylvain, seasonal municipal employees of Cap-Seize and Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, all the ice time necessary to talk about their work and its impact on their village, its (young) inhabitants, as well as on their own lives. At the same time, he hands the microphone to a few neighbors in an alley in Villeray from different generations who have passed the baton in the making of an ephemeral ice rink for several winters, and takes us to Pessamit to meet those who have perpetuated the practice of hockey for fun and which make it accessible to women in the community, in an annual tournament reserved for them. And he ends up convincing us of the unifying power of ice by letting a skate sharpener from Mexico tell us about his particular taming of winter. We leave with warmed hearts, in the hope of shivering soon.
To see in video