Quebec My Country Mon Pays turns its eye to Canadian unity

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      A documentary by John Walker. In English and French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

      “To this day,” asserts Quebec film great Denys Arcand in Quebec My Country Mon Pays, “French-Canadians and Anglo-Canadians do not know each other at all.”

      A veteran documentarian and cinematographer perhaps best-known for codirecting the 1987 Jackie Burroughs vehicle A Winter Tan, writer-director John Walker was born and raised in Montreal, to a Scots-Irish family that had been there for generations. That was back when “the English” ran the worlds of business and politics, and the Catholic Church dominated the everyday lives of francophones. Those twin yokes started to slip in the early ’60s, when Walker felt his first stirrings of artistic drive and cultural identity.

      It was only after the secessionist movement, with the FLQ on its extreme edge, pushed his family out of the province that the future filmmaker started realizing what a privileged existence he had led up until then. A sense of haunted history drives the well-researched and thought-through documentary, with a soundtrack calling on everything from John Coltrane to Robert Charlebois helping to pull it together. It certainly helps that Walker, with his keen eye for both design and content, began with a really remarkable trove of mostly black-and-white photographs recalling the family’s farming past and, later, his own pictures of the burgeoning movement—including early shots of a newly ascendant Pierre Trudeau.

      The 90-minute effort spends some time on the familiar turf war between Trudeau and René Lévesque, but the really interesting stuff details the internationalist demimonde of artists, musicians, and filmmakers who flocked to the National Film Board after it moved its headquarters to Montreal in 1956. In one of many unresolved ironies on offer here (with Walker providing smart, if sometimes slightly clunky, narration), these artists represented both a multicultural, francophone haven and a boon to Québécois pushing for a separate identity, and country.

      His attempts to capture the region’s ongoing tensions include visits with numerous touchstones of modern Quebec history, plus a side trip to Scotland, during its own recent failed referendum. In the end, the Two Solitudes still eye each other warily, but every sort of Canadian should view this valuable record for a better understanding of how we live together, even when we don’t quite know who “we” are.

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