Synopsis
While filming his native land, David B. Ricard is entrusted with the task of documenting the creative process of a show of poetry and music across the Canadian Francophonie. This project gives him the opportunity to question the relationship to roots (land, language), adaptation (poetry, territory), and the process of relating to the other (team, subject). In this documentary essay, the filmmaker questions his own point of view as a Quebec documentarist. He explores these themes formally inspired by the poem Le vivant by Carl Lacharité, the driving force of the project.
A word from Tënk
David B. Ricard's approach bears the traces of a thought in the making. Not a cinema that attests to a well-rounded reflection, contained and neutralized, ready to be communicated, but a cinema of wandering, of rambling, of digression and trial and error. We gain access to the anxieties of a filmmaker and his motion sickness, to the sound tests of a boom operator who pushes the note, and to the nervousness of a team of artists who try to get in touch quickly with people on the street, for a relational art project. From digression to breakthrough, from detours to introspective flights of fancy, the film ends up conveying a broad reflection on language. To hear in the accents, the words, the regionalisms, the patois, the forgotten expressions, the same poem 100 times rewritten, one realizes just how much the act of communication occurs in the margins. In the gaps that arise from each word, images, sensations, errors, and assumptions slip through, making each conversation a unique and intractable performance. And the singing francophonie that unfolds throughout the film lulls and astonishes, unlocking unsuspected soundscapes.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director
