Neighborhood disputes that escalate have fed the cinema. On Thursday, I read my colleague Gabriel Béland’s text on this intolerant family from Beaconsfield, irritated to the point of losing their minds by the games of the children in their neighborhood, and I told myself that this story would make a good film script.
A toxic neighborhood film like the remarkable As bestas, on view since Friday and inspired by a true story: that of a couple (French in the film, Dutch in reality) who settle in the inhospitable mountains of Galicia, Spain, hoping to make biological agriculture. The husband is the subject of threats, attacks and intimidation from xenophobic neighbours, whom he films to show evidence, but his complaints to the police go unanswered.
The opposite happened to Neall Epstein, father of two girls aged 2 and 4, arrested in 2021 while returning from a march in his West Island neighborhood. His neighbor Michael Naccache, 34 and living with his parents, accused him of filming and threatening him following a dispute over his parents’ dangerous driving on a residential street where there are several children.1.
It was rather Naccache who was filming Epstein, thanks to cameras placed in the home and in his parents’ cars, which revealed that they had tried to scare the children by driving dangerously close to them. Michael Naccache’s father even, according to Neall Epstein, threatened to intentionally hit the children with his car.
What had raised the ire of the Naccaches? The children were playing in the street. They even drew with chalk on the pavement…
It did not take more for the Naccaches to complain to the police and obtain, God knows by what aberration in a clogged judicial system, that the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) lay charges against Neall Epstein. The father of the family had the audacity to respond with two middle fingers to attempts to intimidate Michael Naccache.
Even the Crown, after Epstein’s testimony and without relying on cross-examination, asked the court to acquit the 45-year-old teacher. What Judge Dennis Galiatsatos, of the Court of Quebec, did, pointing out that the Naccaches should consider themselves lucky not to be themselves accused of dangerous driving, assault and threats.
The extreme absurdity of the situation did not escape anyone (except the DPCP). We were amused by the wrathful declaration of Judge Galiatsatos, who specified that the middle finger was a fundamental “divine right”, guaranteed by the Canadian Constitution. That a judge must on the other hand, in 2023, defend the right of children to play in the street is absolutely nothing funny.
Judge Galiatsatos was quite right in his judgment to question whether suburban life suited the Naccache family. I grew up in the very suburb where this neighbor fight took place. In a quiet street that ended in a roundabout, a bit like in this story. It is perhaps also for this reason that she challenges me.
I spent hours, from childhood to adolescence, playing in the street, passing myself a soccer ball off the curb, throwing from the street to the strike zone (the middle panel of the garage door) with a tennis ball, racketing balls with my brother on either side of the house, playing “stick ball” with the neighbors (and a stick cut hockey), practicing my slap shot and, of course, playing traditional ball hockey with friends.
I remember pick-up games after school with the neighbors. We had two aluminum goals that barely held together, makeshift goalie equipment and a lot of fun. We didn’t come home, against our will, until suppertime, when our parents had insisted enough. And since we lived in a cul-de-sac, we rarely had to pack down the nets to let the cars pass.
I can’t remember a single time when an impatient motorist looked indisposed or upset about our hockey games.
The only time I witnessed dangerous driving on our street was when I crashed into a snowbank while learning manual driving in my mother’s Renault 5.
The Naccache family, in their senseless accusations against Neall Epstein, suggested that in the suburbs children should play in the backyard. Hardly ever, in 10 years of living in the suburbs, have I played in the yard with friends. The street was our playground. It remains a playground. It does not belong to brainless motorists. We shouldn’t need a court order to remember that.