The filming of Brigitte Poupart’s first feature-length fiction film, Where do souls go?ended this week in the town of Léry, on the shores of Lake Saint-Louis, after 28 days. The Press attended the recording of a scene from this drama which addresses the themes of family, mourning and forgiveness.
We are on the grounds of the superb house that Honoré Mercier, Liberal MP for Châteauguay from 1907 to 1936 and son of the former Premier of Quebec of the same name, lived in at the beginning of the last century. A house that is currently for sale, by the way. Interested parties take note…
In the garden, facing Lake Saint-Louis, the film crew is preparing to shoot one of the last scenes of the film, which stars Sara Montpetit in the role of an 18-year-old girl, Anna, who asks for medical assistance in dying in order to end her suffering – she has lymphatic cancer.
But before she dies, Anna wants to reunite her half-sisters Éléonore (Julianne Côté) and Ève (Monia Chokri), whom she has not seen since the imprisonment of their father, a renowned pianist convicted of sexual assault – who we do not see, but who we will hear, played by Jean Marchand.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, THE PRESS
Filming outside the house of Honoré Mercier fils, in the town of Léry
In the scene in question, Éléonore throws a chair into a fire alongside her mother, played by French actress Sylvie Testud. “One of Anna’s last wishes was that we burn all the artifacts and objects she had tinkered with in her little den,” Julianne Côté tells us. “That’s what I do in this scene.”
“Her life changed when she testified against her father with her sister Eve,” she adds. “As he was a well-known person, the trial was highly publicized, so she subsequently fell into depression and abandoned her studies in architecture. She is rebuilding…”
So we are in the family home of this fallen man, “where he built his heritage,” director Brigitte Poupart tells us. “The place is a character, because the place represents the father,” she insists. “His office has remained intact, so we feel his presence and that is what will trouble the two half-sisters.”
Anna seeks to rehabilitate this man who claims his innocence, because she is convinced that he has not committed a crime.
“If Anna wants to end her days in this house, it is precisely to get closer to her father,” says Brigitte Poupart. “She testified in favor of her father, like her mother, and that is why her half-sisters cut ties, because they felt betrayed.”
If Brigitte Poupart wanted to tell this story, it was to show the collateral damage suffered by members of a family following a tragedy.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, THE PRESS
Director Brigitte Poupart, with the film’s script supervisor, Isabelle Faivre-Duboz
We never talk about what it does to a family when a tragedy like this happens. We follow the victim or we follow the executioner, but what does it do to the family? How do we live with the shame, with the opprobrium, of having loved a man we thought was good? A father who does something monstrous? That’s what I wanted to talk about in this film.
Birigitte Poupart, director
Sylvie Testud plays Anna’s mother, and therefore the first wife of this man she met in Europe during one of her tours, and who decides to stay in Quebec, in particular to take care of his daughter.
The French actress confided to us that when she was halfway through the script, she was “in tears.” “A girl who writes that, it’s sure to work,” said Sylvie Testud, who had not known Brigitte Poupart before.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, THE PRESS
Julianne Côté (from behind), Sara Montpetit and Sylvie Testud on the film set
“It’s a drama that talks about life,” continues Sylvie Testud. “Through this medical assistance in dying, it talks about the relationships we have with each other. How do we agree to let go of a person because they want us to?” All this against a backdrop of assaults, of course.
“The person who asks to leave, if they don’t offer you peace with them, in the relationship, they will leave you with a huge mark, that’s what the film is about.”
Sylvie Testud is on her third shoot in Quebec. We saw her in Pierre’s happiness – with Pierre Richard and Rémy Girard, among others – but also in Love your fatherwhen she was in her twenties, with Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume, in the 1990s.
The documentary school
Brigitte Poupart, whose first feature-length fiction film this is, was completely at ease behind the camera. Her direction of the actors was also appreciated, with Julianne Côté praising her “choreographic” approach.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, THE PRESS
Brigitte Poupart talking with Julianne Côté on the film set
“Documentary is a good school,” she believes. “You learn the hard way, you sometimes work in extreme conditions, with natural light… Fiction is a gift because you have the time to set the frame, the light, to work on your story. It’s thanks to documentary that I can have fun in fiction!”
And Brigitte Poupart will have other fiction projects because she caught the virus. “I fell in love, seriously,” she confides. But the director ofOver My Dead Body (on the fight of dancer and choreographer Dave St-Pierre against cystic fibrosis) does not abandon the documentary for all that.
She is working on a film, Through your eyesin which her daughter Fabiola – now 26 – returned to her birth country of Haiti in 2019 with her. “I adopted her when she was two and a half, but we found out she was three and a half. She’s the one holding the camera, that’s why it’s called Through your eyes. I think it’s going to be very touching.”
Produced by Étienne Hansez for Bravo Charlie and distributed by Axia Films, Where do souls go? will be released in 2025.