Between the head, feet and the heart
“The geography can be learned by the feet.” This is what says Louis-Edmond Hamelin, the new character attaching which filmmaker Serge Giguère infatuated. This sensitive and talented portraitist often makes us discover beings of exception, as the musicians Guy Nadon (the King of the drum) and Gilles Garand (the real of the megaphone) or the worker-priest Raymond Roy (9, Saint-Augustin).
Its is gaze this time on this brilliant researcher, Professor Emeritus, man of culture… and the Aboriginal culture particularly! Indeed, Louis-Edmond Hamelin appears as one of his biggest supporters, but his interest is not based on an emotional and raucous activism; his first visits to the North that it was tattooed on the heart date back to 1947, in the James Bay area. Many of his fellow passengers were (already) good business, came to the meeting of peoples and landscapes which he wanted to understand the complexity.
In the North in the heart, the filmmaker dissects the plan of a man gone to the conquest of the Northern. This word, Hamelin has wrought, and many others for it to better expose a ‘reality which is not in the actual absolute ‘. In the same way that Inuit have multiple adjectives to describe snowflakes, it wasn’t going to be confined to a few expressions waves to illustrate the ice, the cold and the snow-covered vastness.
His first contact amazed with the natives (during a Eucharistic Congress chaired by cardinal Villeneuve!) to his scepticism to the ambitions of the former Northern Premier Jean Charest, the geographer long attached to Université Laval delves into his memories of pioneering, teacher and scientist. This is how we view its very personal methods of linguist, air René Lévesque met over lands detailing off the then liberal Minister and his severe criticism of the development of mining and energy of this vast part of the province. Moreover, the is too often ignored, has always been convinced that “Quebec, isn’t that the St. Lawrence Valley.
To prove it, the man signed a few essays, marking it Canadian Nordicity, Inuit language dictionaries, and worn several pairs of boots and shoes during his long career that took him from Yellowknife to Trois-Rivières through Grenoble, where he met his wife, also geographer. This route of an intellectual field (it is not oxymoronic) is interspersed with extracts of archives (including some films of Pierre Perrault) and animation sequences, bringing color and relief. Another great figure in the beautiful Gallery of Serge Giguère.
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