Synopsis
Twenty young actors are brought together for a creation lab by stage directors Véronique and Gabrielle Côté, to create a collective work at one of the great national theatres. Over a full year, they scour contemporary Québécois poetry to tap into the spirit of the times. Whether in workshop settings or at the four corners of the territory, we watch the creative process of _Upwelling _unfold. What kind of people will we be in the future? How can art transform the world? Will we still be able to have children? Rebellious, filled with the passion of those who dream of beauty, obeying only their intuition, they come together to forge an ode to life. And when one of theirs is elected to the Quebec’s National Assembly, poetry literally becomes an integral part of the country’s political landscape.
A word from Tënk
Two stage directors focused on unveiling the voices of Quebec’s contemporary poetry scene burst through the screen with the unassuming thunderclap of their excited and contagious laughter, as they watch their theatre project take its first steps. That laughter is all it takes to convince us to join them on a long adventure.
With a wave of a wand, they metamorphosize in metaphor into two tiny, busy ants, criss-crossing through stacks of collections that rise, with one voice, to the height of a closed fist, like the gradual building of a collective identity. They carry everything back to their nascent queen, she who will brandish the trident, the letters and words whose politics they will choose to honour. And they invite their twenty collaborators to rack their collective brains and scale these monuments of parables, metaphors, ideas and allegories, as if they were so many magic bean seedlings, and we see how one’s rising up can become our collective upwelling.
Passionate, hardworking, indefatigable, they fish for phrases that will deliver the opening salvo to a political polyphonic poetry performance; they search and sketch out, together, the spirit of their time.
In his own anthill, built of the same sand but with a ten-year lead, Hugo Latulippe vibrates with the optimism that he believes is inherent to humanity, as he prepares an apology for the future, searching for the sacred in the political gaze of the post-Maple-Spring generation, who continue to give their collective support to movements while treading the boards.
Everything on the screen looks sacred, from the initiation questions of one of the stage directors to the pod of belugas. And if the sacred comes from images, the words only confirm it once more: it’s living together, it’s life itself that is sacred.
Latulippe takes a tone that allows affects to shine through clearly, supported by a foundation of narrative lyricism, camera trained on the intimate process of creation, on individual testimonials, chasing the authenticity behind the masks. All of this and more while we fly over Quebec’s grand landscapes, laying a film of poetry over the natural beauty of the land.
Gabrielle Ouimet
Tënk's Artistic Director
