Ta parole est en jeu - Les Franco-Terreneuviens et Labradoriens

Based on the last recording by one of Newfoundland's foremost traditional music performers, Emile Benoit's tender delivery of the 18th century French song is the heart of Vive la rose. The story of unrequited love and tentative obsession throughout the beloved's life, sickness and early death is the narrative focus, accompanied by an emotional interpretation of Benoit's strong Newfoundland French accent and wavering old man's voice. Vive la rose is animation on location, rooting the film in a location that evokes the past, and combines ink drawings with a variety of romantic and associative elements and objects.

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.

This feature-length documentary is an on-the-spot record of the student protests that shook the Université de Moncton in 1968-69. Led by students desiring greater recognition of the French fact in New Brunswick, the protests spawned street marches, petitions and a sit-in, but also many discussions among students seeking to re-establish an Acadian identity.

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.

This feature documentary tells the story of the Notre-Dame-du-Sacré-Cœur Congregation which was formed in 1924 when 53 French-speaking nuns separated from their unilingual English community, forming a new religious community that immediately began to campaign for the preservation of Acadian language, faith and culture. Convinced that education was essential for Acadian women, in 1943 the Congregation founded Collège Notre-Dame d’Acadie, where young women were able to study in French for the first time in New Brunswick.

In this experimental short, filmmaker Jeffrey St. Jules reconstructs the story of his grandparents and their rugged frontier existence in the logging towns of Northern Ontario. A blend of fiction and documentary, the film stitches together a fractured family history that is filled with both the joie de vivre and hardships reflective of Franco-Ontarian life.

No challenge is too great for 10-year-old Ti-Jean. As in his other exploits, he proves equal to every situation. Working his boat passage, flying an aircraft, saving a mine from disaster—all are in day's work for him before he mounts his white horse and rides off in search of new adventures.

In this short documentary, three French-speaking women (from Senegal, Mexico and Belgium) examine their own experiences as immigrants in Vancouver, where they raise their children alone. With strength and resilience, these women take up the challenge of rebuilding their lives to provide a “new world of possibility” for their children, while seeking to find their place in Canadian society.
This film was made as part of the Tremplin program, in collaboration with Radio-Canada.