Synopsis
Since the 1990s, the old Gaulin Manor has housed erstwhile residents of the Saint-Hyacinthe psychiatric hospital. Some thirty inhabitants occupy this alternative lodging space, their salvation after the wave of deinstitutionalization that one day threw them into the streets with no resources. Profit rules, and so this motel at the world’s end will be destroyed to fill the pockets of promoters. The film captures this turning of the page, where each lost character reshuffles their daily life in moving on to the next chapter. Lending an ear to these forgotten outcasts, Manor carefully frames these figures, bringing them to life in the light of our attention.
A word from Tënk
Manor, the first feature-length documentary from filmmaker duo Martin Fournier et Pier-Luc Latulippe, announces the beginnings of their authentic, honest, and meaningful approach that has been further refined with their second feature film, Dehors Serge Dehors.
A delicate incursion into the heart of a home regulated by the daily lives of unique and fascinating characters, it is populated by beings who have worked meticulously to operationalize its internal control. This life-saving and much-cherished space that was once offered to residents, a few years later, will be unscrupulously stolen from them. They prepare to vacate and to return to the possible clutches of a life that they have tried so hard to escape.
Inhabited by souls with unbridled imaginations, this place nests itself somewhere between here and elsewhere: the here of a comforting and certain present and the elsewhere of an uncertain and worrisome tomorrow. The elusive atmosphere that hovers between these two space-times is magnificently rendered by Olivier Tétreault’s lens. Infused with a great poetry, his camera travels along the corridors, floats into the common spaces, and succeeds in introducing itself, with an infinite sensitivity, into the impenetrable depths of its subjects as they cling to their memories, to the anecdotes of their lives, to their dreams, their collections, their worlds.
Fournier and Latulippe confirm with this first work that they have quickly understood the essence of a truly and intrinsically documentary approach. To capture reality without artifice, to let the subject come to them in full freedom and at their own pace. Fournier and Latulippe shoot film for good reasons: they perform their work as archivists of stories and collectors of realities with the infinite patience that documentary as a discipline demands.
Giving a voice to the disenfranchised, these two filmmakers made themselves a mission and we, their public, can only but be grateful to them for helping us to hear, to understand, and to embrace their subjects. The very last sequence of the film alone makes viewing Manor worthwhile: infused with the kind of beauty that succeeds in rendering the abject, the reality of desolation, and in so doing, making it even more striking.
Virginie Dubois
Cinephile, first and foremost
Part-time producer
