Acadie à venir

This bilingual film features the Commissioner of Official Languages and two intermediate school students. The Commissioner explains, in English and in French, the Official Languages Act, his duties and the activities of his Office under the Act. A number of light-hearted situations simulated in the film demonstrate how individual efforts can put Canada's two official languages on an equal basis.

In this feature-length documentary by Alanis Obomsawin, it's the summer of 2000 and the country watches in disbelief as federal fisheries wage war on the Mi'kmaq fishermen of Burnt Church, New Brunswick. Why would officials of the Canadian government attack citizens for exercising rights that had been affirmed by the highest court in the land? Casting her cinematic and intellectual nets into history to provide context, Obomsawin delineates the complex roots of the conflict with passion and clarity, building a persuasive defence of the Mi'kmaq position.

Through the coming of age of a twenty-year-old man, this film symbolizes the political coming of age of the people of Québec. In French with English subtitles.

Soundtrack album, John's Coltrane's Blue World, available from Impulse! / Universal Music Enterprises.

Part documentary, part drama, this film presents the life and work of Jack Kerouac, an American writer with Québec roots who became one of the most important spokesmen for his generation. Intercut with archival footage, photographs and interviews, this film takes apart the heroic myth and even returns to the childhood of the author whose life and work contributed greatly to the cultural, sexual and social revolution of the 1960s.

This feature-length documentary tells the story of two very different men brought together by New Brunswick's decision to hand the management of millions of acres of Crown land to six multinationals. One man is an Acadian woodlot owner retired after nearly 40 years in a pulp mill; the other is a painter and winemaker with homes in France and New Brunswick.

The activitists travel to Finland, home of UPM-Kymmene, one of the largest licence holders of New Brunswick Crown lands, to urge company officials to practise responsible forestry. They also go head-to-head with the provincial government to secure a new community-based forestry policy that is environmentally sustainable and produces more jobs than the highly mechanized techniques used today.

A feature drama about a girl torn between two cultures, the English-speaking community of Vancouver where she grew up and the French-speaking Québec where the film opens. Her uncertainty extends to her lovers, one from Vancouver who wants to take her home and the other from Québec who would like to continue their pleasant, if inconclusive affair. The settings show a Québec winter and British Columbia spring.

Part comic adventure, part travelogue, this short film features the folkloric character of Ti-Jean, a French-Canadian kid endowed with magic powers. He travels west, drawing upon his superhuman strength to save a farmer’s crops. In their day (the 1950s) the Ti-Jean films were among the NFB’s most popular titles.

This feature documentary pays homage to the special character of an enduring people: the Acadians. Two hundred years after Expulsion of the Acadians by the British (1755–1764), Acadian culture is still very much alive. But why do Acadians—whose ancestors founded the first colony in North America—have to keep making a racket to tell the world they're still here?

In this documentary short, summer trippers line up for the famous local fried clams and whole families dig for the white mollusc in the tangy air of the sandbars. But as the clams dwindle, so do these tableaux from Maritime culture. For commercial fishermen it's the end of a livelihood; for others, it's the death of a tradition. Can this really be the end of a resource that used to be as plentiful as the air we breathe? In French with English subtitles.

This documentary was made as part of the Tremplin program, with the collaboration of Radio-Canada.

Acadians have been enamoured of their community radio station, CJSE, for 16 years now. The station is well rooted in the community and has become a unique observer of its day-to-day reality, evolution, culture and struggles, providing listeners with an image that corresponds to their ever-changing identity. This documentary was made as part of the 2012 Tremplin competition and produced with the collaboration of Radio-Canada. In French with English subtitles.

This documentary was made as part of the Tremplin program, with the collaboration of Radio-Canada.

This short documentary links family memories to the evolution of Acadian French. Bittersweet Blues reveals the dilemma that Acadians face: do they adopt normative French in order to be better understood, or proudly continue to use their own language, which reflects the colourful flavour of their own authentic culture?

This film was made as part of the Tremplin program, in collaboration with Radio-Canada.