Fiction completes the reality that goes beyond fiction. While working on his character as an agricultural worker in the Quebec series 5e Rank, Christian de la Cortina met people who led him to dig deeper into the subject. The result was a fiction film as well as the documentary My friend Omar. The battle of a seasonal worker, which in turn inspired the TV novel. Meeting with the actor and director, who is broadcasting this first documentary on Saturday and wants to broaden Quebecers’ conception of immigration.
Temporary foreign workers are increasingly represented in Quebec works, whether in cinema or in The drunken birds And Richelieuor on television, in the series Raspberry time. De la Cortina played the role of Sandro Perez in the popular soap opera 5e Rankwhich aired its final episode last month after years of keeping more than a million viewers in suspense every week.
It is therefore first by doing some research to deepen this role that the actor of Chilean origin meets different people, including agricultural workers and people without status. While he was filming in Saint-Rémi, in Montérégie, he saw several agricultural migrants in a small shopping center. Some people fear speaking to him, even in Spanish, a language he obviously masters. “I found it really weird,” he said.
Other conversations left their mark on him, and he even decided to make a fiction film about it, Undocumented, which will be on display next fall. The main character is an undocumented worker on a dairy farm in Vermont and is played by the director himself.
“I did some research and found that people were really treated like cattle, with electronic bracelets on their ankles when they were grabbed by the border patrol,” he says.
Delicate to approach
By digging deeper, he decided to make it a work of reality. “At the start, when I said I was making a documentary, there were people who were against it! People told me: “We are in Quebec, that’s not true. It must be 1 of 20,000.” » Which surprised him.
The subject “abrupts” people, notes De la Cortina: “It was only when a UN rapporteur came to Canada that my mother accepted that yes, it could happen in Quebec, abuses,” says he gives as an example.
By meeting Omar, the protagonist of the documentary, which will be broadcast on Radio-Canada on Saturday, he sees the fear that inhabits the man. “I met him secretly the first time,” says the actor.
The rest of the story proved him right, since what this man from Guatemala feared happened: the largest recruitment agency in agriculture, FERME, was going to exclude him from its list under the pretext that he had left the farm like a fugitive. Omar’s version is rather that he was looking to find another employer in order to escape a toxic and discriminatory work environment. “They were going to taint my papers,” as he put it.
It is only with the intervention of the director that the conclusion of the story changes.
Already, “Omar had the audacity to record the farmer”, then certain conversations with the recruitment agency in question. Unpublished information is revealed in these recordings, in particular by FERME, which has for years defended itself from keeping a “black list” of temporary foreign workers.
Reality is demanding, and Christian de la Cortina begins to fill out complaint forms, calling the agency and support organizations himself.
Hence the notion of friendship, announced in the title. On the screen, we see the director’s good will, but also his beautiful, shiny watch and his luxury car roaring along the country roads. “I’m tired of everyone thinking immigrants are poor. It’s not true that we have snot on our noses and that we are poorly dressed,” he illustrates.
He says he is not overly offended by still being confined to Latino roles in Quebec. “Where I have a problem is if I’m still called to be a wife beater. I put my foot down now and ask if it’s because I’m Latino. But I also have great Latino roles,” he explains without resentment.
His character in 5e Rank was actually rather rosy: “Sandro has blondes, he is made partner of the farm, etc. When I approached the authors, I said that I would also like to talk about the problems of agricultural workers. » The two screenwriters indeed agreed to add a plot in which an agricultural producer treats his employees badly. And the circle was closed.