LUCIDMEDIA

La Donation: Returning to Canadian roots and leaving a legacy of charity

Written by Jeanie Keogh Friday, 23 April 2010 11:05

The final instalment of French-Canadian director Bernard Emond’s humanist trilogy is concerned with nothing less than the meaning of life. La Donation (The Legacy) answers the question of what to do with one’s life—give.

But for a story about the selfless gifts of charity, faith, and healing, Emond’s film has been the recipient of three Las Palmas awards, a special jury selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, and theatrical runs in Europe and North America.

Told through the eyes of a naïve young doctor, Emond takes his audience into rural Quebec to explore themes of anonymity, fate, and Christian virtues. A professed non-believer, Emond said he is nonetheless attached to the Roman Catholic traditions of his upbringing.

“These virtues are exactly what we need,” says Emond. “Whether we're believers or not…they overthrow the unjust order of the world.”

The story follows Jeanne Dion (Elise Guilbault), a surgeon from a chaotic Montréal ER as she wrestles with the decision to relocate to a small town, and struggles to accept her purpose in life. Having attempted suicide in the first instalment of the trilogy, Dion has done her best to put the tragedy of her patients behind her. Emond describes Dion’s condition as a rampant one in the din of the cities, especially where large populations breed a moral disconnect.

“If we don't have morality it will turn into a jungle,” says Emond. “It's already like that. I'm 58 years-old I have seen the world change, much for the worst and I sometimes have the feeling of living in a novel from Balzac—where the rich and the famous have terrible power, and where injustice is seen as the norm. So I think it's important to ask moral and ethical questions.”

In each instalment of his trilogy, Emond argues that the communal morality of rural landscapes is continually threatened by urban expansion and population density.

“We live in an era of delocalization,” he says. “It’s difficult to know in the luxury district of a modern city whether you’re in Barcelona or Paris or Buenos Aires. In our time, places have lost meaning. They have all become similar. Saul Bellow once wrote that to be modern is to be without roots. He’s right but I hope it’s possible to be modern while keeping roots to the place we’re in.”

These themes of modernization and rootlessness are what drew Emond to set his film in Normetal, Quebec. He explained that shooting on location in a once-thriving mining town was an important decision, one that he hopes resonates with families who now, or have once lived in one of these “ghost towns”.

“Even though people are city dwellers,” he says, “there’s this feeling that Quebec and Canada are not Montreal and Toronto. I think that many city dwellers still have roots through their family to other places. Of course, newcomers to Canada don’t have this, and I think it’s our task to tell them ‘Go outside Montreal, go outside Toronto, go explore, go and see, this is where you live.”

Emond argues that much of the international success of La Donation is due to the film’s ability to resonate with citizens from around the world who have experienced this rootlessness and Diaspora.

“What’s extraordinary is that it is understood very clearly outside of Canada,” says Emond. “I’ve shown the film in Korea and they understood. In Italy people understood.”

Another component to Emond’s recent success may owe a debt to his ability to tap into this globally consciousness. As the global village takes shape, people are beginning to express concerns for lost values and outdated traditions. With his films, Emond argues that as cities expand, it becomes increasingly difficult to view each of the millions of citizens as living, breathing humans. The tendency with large groups of people is to look at them as a group, not as individuals. In the end, Emond hopes that La Donation will be accepted as a celebration of human content.

“Often people will tell me, ‘I didn't know that I like that kind of film’ because the films are very simple. But at the same time, the style is not what people are used to. Meanwhile the human content is very manifest and very simple.”

What makes the film accessible is the trust Emond has for the viewer. He doesn’t overtly manipulate the medium, but instead he opts for gentle pacing, long takes, and extended silences. In that way, he grants his audiences time and space in which to reflect on the human toll of social progress.

For Emond, part of a director’s responsibility is to respect the viewer enough to provide a simple story with weight and depth.

“We live in a world where we are solicited by millions of images,” he says. “We lose attention to the world. We're constantly distracted. In my films there's a conscious will to solicit attention of the viewers.”