When interviewed back in
2005 about his massively successful dual French English language black comedy buddy
cop film, Bon Cop Bad Cop,
producer Ken Tierney said a major
impetus of the film was the effort to bring Canadians outside of Quebec
what Quebec was already enjoying: a robust, popular cinema supported enthusiastically
by the public. He made a good point.
Some of the Canadian film industry's most culturally significant and instantly
recognizable output is coming from Quebec, Canada's only province with French
as its sole official language.
They dominate our award shows.
They've got Denis Villeneuve and Xavier Dolan.
They've got their own star system with actors
like Pascal Bussières and Jessica Paré getting the A-list treatment
and almost half of TIFF’s 2015 list of the best
Canadian films ever is from, you guessed it, Quebec.
Actually, according to a report by the Canadian Media Producers
Association, Quebec has surpassed every other province in the volume
of Canadian theatrical films they produce almost every year since 2012.
Of course, this leaves behind a burning question. Why is Quebec's film industry
commercially and culturally thriving while the rest of Canada is kind of flopping?
At least commercially speaking.
Cinema has been a
staple of French Canada, basically since cinema was invented.
The first film to ever be exhibited in Canada by the Lumière brothers
was shown in Montreal. The first feature length film to ever be made in Canada,
Evangeline in 1913, was about the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians.
But a more distinctly Quebecois cinema would emerge with the work of Léo-Ernest Ouimet,
who installed a number of theatres in Quebec and other provinces
and made slice of life amateur films about his family, a style that had echoes
of the direct cinema documentary genre that Canada later became known for.
After the talkies arrived, a lot of the films that were being made
in the province were, believe it or not, by priests.
At the time, Quebec was a very Catholic province,
and around the 1930s, amateur filmmakers and religious leaders like Albert Tessier
and Maurice Proulx were making ethnographic films about topics
like rural life and agriculture and nature and religion.
You may ask why priests?
Well, many of their films
were funded by the province in an effort to reflect and promote traditional values.
After the Second World War, Le Père Chopin came out.
This film helped create a new, vertically integrated industry
with international contacts and religious support.
This gave us films like La Petite Aurore l'enfant Martyre in 1952
and Ti-Coq in 1953, both of which more or less defined the postwar period.
But outside of Montreal,
Quebec was still largely viewed as a traditional agricultural society,
and it would take a monumental turn of events for this all to change.
After Jean Lesage came to power in the early 1960s,
Quebec underwent a period of extreme social, political and economic
transformation, which was dubbed the quiet revolution. As more or less a rejection
of the previous government's traditional value systems and economic systems,
the new goal was to reorganize Quebec into a modern society,
as well as protect the province's distinct culture
by making French its official language, which allowed more opportunities
for the francophone portion of the population
and partially contributed to a mass exodus of English speakers as well.
The quiet revolution led to a bit of a boom in French Canadian filmmaking.
The National Film Board had moved their headquarters
from Ottawa to Montreal and created a new special French division.
So now Francophone filmmakers were getting noticed.
The industry also became more structured
during this time, and films of this period reflected these changes.
A more nationalistic, politically engaged and distinctly French-Canadian spirit
was echoed in films like Gilles Groulx’s Le Chat dans le sac
and Denys Arcand’s 1970 documentary, On est au coton.
This was also when the now disgraced Claude Jutra was coming up, whose 1971
drama, Mon Oncle Antoine,
is widely regarded as one of the best Canadian films in history.
So there was a direct correlation between the province's social
and political transformation and the enrichment of its film industry.
Like Bill Marshall says in his book Quebec National Cinema:
It was only in the post-Second World War era, and especially after 1960,
that a Francophone business class and technocracy gained hegemony in society.
And here the new mass media beginning with radio
and then television and cinema, played a crucial role.
The exuberance for promoting Quebecois culture grew so strong
over the next couple of decades that by the time the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois
under René Lésvesque was voted into office, public support was very high.
But remember, this was around the time of the tax shelter
era when Canada was making a ton of commercial films
for an extremely low cost.
It was also around when Hollywood's influence
was slowly encroaching on our industry.
So in response, Lésvesque passed the Quebec Cinema Act in 1983,
which made it so that distributors had to actually be located in Quebec and
also invest at least 10% of their revenue into Quebec's film industry
and be at least 80% Canadian owned in order to distribute their films.
This made the Motion Picture Association of America,
which represented the Hollywood majors, unhappy.
Very unhappy indeed.
They were like, We are going to boycott the Quebec film
market if you pass this act and ended up getting themselves special standing.
This made it so that Canadian distributors who weren't based in Quebec were shut
out of the province's distribution market.
So there was a greater proportion of American films
and very few English language Canadian films being made there.
So why is it that even though
American films still dominate film production here in Canada, so many Quebecois
people are still going out to see films made by Quebec for Quebec?
Well, like I said,
since the Quiet Revolution, Quebec has fought to preserve and foster
a distinct culture and a sense of nationalism
that's different from the rest of Canada.
And much of this has to do with making French their official language.
Think about it.
The rest of Canada is, for the most part, English speaking,
which is the same language primarily spoken in the US.
So our films lack
a language
differentiation from American ones
and thus have to compete with them at the box office.
If you're a French speaking Quebec citizen with a lot of pride
in where you come from and the language you speak, it's likely
you'll want to go see the films that represent you.
As Marshall writes,
the construction and development of a Quebec national cinema has therefore
included aspects of assertion, but also contestation.
In carving out a culture that's distinct from the rest of Canada
in order to secure legal and political rights,
Quebec established a national cinema that was not only distinct but popular.
All of this has led to where we are today, with Quebec being a political and cultural
anomaly in North America, which has managed
to create a film industry that's also an anomaly.
In the years following 1983,
a ton of well celebrated filmmakers and films have emerged from Quebec.
In the nineties there was André Turpin with Jules & Fanny, Micheline Lanctôt with Deux Actrices,
Robert Morin with Windigo, and Robert LePage with Le Confessionnal to name a few.
The 2000’s, which was a period of increased film subsidies from the provincial governments,
brought about even more success for Quebecois filmmakers, on a global scale.
You’d have to live under a rock not to know about Denis Villeneuve
and his international work on Sicario, Dune and Blade Runner 2049.
But it was through his widely acclaimed
homegrown films like Incendies, Enemy and Polytechnique,
which was about one of the greatest tragedies
in modern Canadian history, that he came to prominence.
Kim Nguyen and Denis Arcand and the late Jean-Marc Vallée,
the director of the first season of Big Little Lies and director
of the widely beloved film Crazy, are other Quebecois directors
who've gained international acclaim.
Actually, Nguyen, Arcand and Villeneuve's Quebec made films have all been nominated for Oscars.
One particularly beloved filmmaker is Xavier Dolan,
who was barely 20 when his first feature film, J’ai tué ma mère, premiered at Cannes
in 2009, later going on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes for his 2016
film, Juste la fin du monde.
So the question of
why Quebec has such a thriving film industry has a pretty clear answer.
As a province, it's established itself as unique from the rest of Canada.
It had a head start in innovating film,
has had a series of governments which have put a great deal of money
into fostering and cultivating the arts and comprises a public
that wants to see their distinct culture and language reflected on screen.
While the rest of Canada suffers from an identity crisis,
You can be sure that Quebec most certainly does not.
And they've got a film industry to prove it.