La république des Beaux-Arts - La malédiction de la momie

Wow! So many memories! Back then, I was a screenwriting student at UQAM, learning the craft of filmmaking. Very quickly, I also chose to dive into production management, which became for me a space of formative experiences on film sets. It was in this context that I met Johanne Bergeron, producer and colleague turned friend, who hired me to manage a film directed by her husband, Claude Laflamme. I was fascinated by the privileges that awaited me: I was stepping into the spirit of Situationism—the revolutionary breath of the 1960s, heir to Surrealism and Marxism—touching the fiery student movement of October ’68, and witnessing the birth of UQAM’s principles of self-management. Double wow!

Doing production management means being in the front row to hear the full stories of the witnesses filmed. At that moment, I was accessing the spirit of a generation that refused the Grande Noirceur, that dreamed of freedom and of art without constraints. In the chivalrous archives of this film, I discovered the magnitude of that moment when student-artists, stripped of everything, were marked by academic and political stances, yearning to break free from them while believing they could take the rest of the world along.

Finally, I cannot overlook the major challenge of this production: it was not only about unearthing this story, but also about waking up that long-asleep mummy in UQAM’s basement and taking it to the scanner! A metaphor the director insisted on at all costs; that’s where I played out my destiny as production manager!

Jokes aside, in our current context where global collective refusal is wearing thin, this film emerges as an antidote to gloom: it recounts an occupation where politics and art were one, where art was lived as freedom and as resistance to all totalitarian thinking.
 

Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker