More than 30 years after the Polytechnique massacre, violence against women and gun control remain at the heart of concerns. On the Web, men continue to erect the killer Marc Lépine as a hero, fomenting hatred against women. Instead of demonizing them, the actors Marie-Joanne Boucher and Jean-Marc Dalphond went to meet them to better understand them and open the dialogue. From this approach was born the documentary podcast Polytechnic project: coping.
“Every December 6, we make commemorations, we observe a moment of silence. But we never ask ourselves questions about our present. There are issues raised by the Polytechnique drama that are still unresolved. We wanted to understand why,” explains Marie-Joanne Boucher in an interview.
The click? It happened four years ago, on the 29e anniversary of the killing. Like every year, Jean-Marc Dalphond wrote on Twitter the names of the 14 murdered women, including his cousin. But in 2018, for the first time, he received hate messages from fans of Marc Lépine. “We thought these women were untouchable. But, ultimately, that was not the case. »
The two actors thus had the desire to plunge back into the drama to create a documentary play. There is no question of telling the massacre again, as several cultural productions have already done. The idea was rather to sit down with those they don’t understand, both those who campaign for less gun control and those who insult women and admire Marc Lépine.
“There is no point turning a blind eye to online misogyny or hyperviolent masculinist groups like the incels. They exist. We have to face this reality,” insists Mr. Dalphond.
Follow the process
It was along the way that the idea of creating a podcast that follows their documentary approach emerged, a work that the public knows little about. Director Myriam Berthelet drew directly from the long hours of recordings that the duo has been accumulating since 2018, whether it be their exchanges, their interviews or their personal reflections.
Through six episodes of about twenty minutes each — and a 10-minute epilogue — listeners accompany the actors to meet the first police officer to intervene at Polytechnique on the evening of the drama, firearms enthusiasts and from activists for greater gun control, but also from experts like Léa Clermont-Dion, who has analyzed misogyny online.
The duo also spoke with a man who almost killed his ex-spouse on several occasions, as well as with an admirer of Marc Lépine, renowned Pierre for the podcast.
“Meeting Pierre was extremely difficult. I went through a lot of questions, questioning the relevance of doing it. […] I felt like I was spitting in the face of my cousin and the other victims, ”says Jean-Marc Dalphond. What allowed him not to flinch? “I understood that I was not meeting a monster, but a human who said monstrous things. »
“The difficult position in this podcast was to find ourselves on this fine line between contradictory emotions: to have empathy for these men, but at the same time to denounce their monstrous words. Do not condemn them, but do not excuse them either”, specifies Myriam Berthelet.
On the planks
The initial project, the documentary play, will be presented in theaters in a year almost to the day. Directed by Marie-Josée Bastien and produced by the company Porte parole, the play will be performed by nine actors, including Marie-Joanne Boucher and Jean-Marc Dalphond.
A tour across Quebec is already planned and then, who knows, maybe outside the province, the duo hopes. “We also want to go to schools. We did the exercise, in our approach, to meet students, and more than half of the room had never heard of the Polytechnique attack, ”says sadly Ms.me Butcher.
This tragedy, we must not forget it. This is why the two actors are working in parallel on a project for a box of memories that they would like to bequeath to the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec. The concept ? Install a photo booth during each performance so that the spectators can share, in the privacy of this box, their memories of the killings. How did they find out about the event? Where were they when it happened?
An application will also be available online to allow everyone to participate in this project and contribute to nourishing the collective memory.