Shadows of Spring

Sylvain L’Espérance’s second film–after the short Les écarts perdus–Shadow of Spring marks a transition in his creative process. Until then, his cinematic approach had been resolutely experimental, but life-changing encounters with the workers who would become his film’s protagonists tipped him right into a big cinematic stew. The documentary–a forerunner of the device that would sit at the heart of his next film–proceeds thus in hybrid form: impressionistic, interviews interlaced with abstract tableaus, poetic imprints.

A triptych portrait of a true demolition site that has been running its course over some thirty years in the working class neighbourhoods of southwest Montreal (where the population had been cut in half), the film also gives a glimpse of incipient gentrification. We follow along as if by anamnesis on a guided tour through these lost lands where destroyed houses, disappeared families, and sunken factories meet swallowed rage beneath a heavy and uncertain sky. The extent of the devastation crystallizes particularly poignantly in a series of photos taken by the municipal administration before the irrevocable destruction of Goose VIllage. With a falsely anodyne air, they shamelessly put on display all of the violence of capitalism (and the despotism of the mayor), immortalizing, with a quasi-colonial gaze, the soon-to-be bulldozed houses along with their impoverished and expropriated residents in intimate scenes from their day-to-day lives.

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant