City Dawn explodes the usual narrative of direct cinema, walking a line stretched tautly between the multitude of origins and destinies that jostle each other in small, anodyne mornings. Entangled in the grey-slack of the dawn hours in the month of March, spectres of everyday life slowly leave their trace in an interlacing of anonymous stories that come to form a synthesis that is nothing less than History itself. Jeannine Gagné gives meaning to the great stirring of the small moments that make up the lives of the excluded, of all those breadwinners who get up early to prepare the city for "real business," to come later. The spectator is carried away–like the angel in Wings of Desire–in the reflections, the anguish, the chanting, and the swarming of the forgotten, transfigured in the great kaleidoscopic echo that gives them, for once, both a memory and a voice. In this, the filmmaker adopts a format similar to her first film, Sans faire d’histoire, co-directed with Michel Lamothe, her faithful accomplice. She multiplies the interplay between sound and image, recorded separately, in a virtuosic collage à la Lipsett where image and dialogue editor Louise Dugal and sound designer Claude Beaugrand’s manifold talents can freely express themselves.

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant