Éloge du retour

Borrowing the form of a filmed and narrated journal, Éloge du retour follows a dual movement that traverses both the buried territories of the intimate and the intersubjective topographies. These opposing—yet not antagonistic—trajectories delicately intertwine as they inscribe themselves in the past, present, and future, through allegorical, documentary, and everyday images.

It is an inner journey of a returnee rediscovering her native motherland and its original inhabitants, or not; a chronicle of a rupture—if not a fragmentation—in the process of being mended. The film follows the three stages of a clearly stated program—"return, feel, be reborn"—to exorcise a pain buried in the sequestration of exile and the abysses of the self.

With great intelligence and subtlety, the filmmaker weaves her film from polysemic images, enveloping them in a sound design that evokes the audible sensuality of the city and the woods, a beautiful illustration of this "feeling" and what she calls "des vagues de souvenirs et des souvenirs vagues" (waves of memories and vague memories).

From the evocation of matricide to the invocation of the maternity that will materialize, from the tearing of the past to the serenity facing the future, Thibodeau reminds us of the forgotten duality of the word "desire" in Latin, desiderium, initially the desire for something one once had, a person one once knew and now misses, from whom one is separated—the regret, in other words. But also, of course, desire as a need, a prayer.

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant