Le petit Jésus combines still and moving archival family footage with interviews with the director's family. Since this film brings together several types of images, the editing was a major technical challenge. Beyond these technical issues, the editing room proved to be a place of reflection aimed at scripting the director's family history. 

How to create a coherent whole from this multiform filmic material? How to tell a personal story and bring out its universal aspects? What working method should be adopted to negotiate the issues involved in editing a documentary film as well as those related to the vulnerability and sensitivity of the director and her family? These are questions that must be asked when editing such a film. 

On the technical level, one of the strategies adopted was to present the archives as a slide show that accompanies the interviews and the soundtrack of the film. In terms of scripting, the idea was to identify what was most likely to resonate with the audience through the film material. In order to do this, we had to take the necessary emotional distance to eliminate what was anecdotal, superfluous, too intimate and exhibitionist and to keep what was most likely to serve the documentary story.

Although the interviews with the family members were sometimes difficult for the filmmaker and her editor, the editing of the film was marked by their friendship. This film is in fact the continuation of a long collaboration. Sophie Leblond and André-Line Beauparlant would then work on Pinocchio, a film that focuses on the incredible life of the director's other brother. Put together, these two films complement and respond to each other, Le petit Jésus allowing us to understand Pinocchio in a different way, and vice versa.

Andréanne Martin
labdoc member