The Pier

Memory and identity are related constructions that build on each other, embroidering between fiction and reality – and it is precisely this mental process that Mireille Dansereau brilliantly stages in Le pier. Through an exemplary montage that interweaves family archives and more recent footage, the filmmaker excavates the visible and unspeakable traces of a personal tragedy that no one has noticed... But her story, full of doubts, gets entangled in the quicksand of her own making.

In this patchwork of intermingling textures (Super 8, 16mm, MiniDV, HD, negative and positive film, etc.) and two-voice narration that intertwine and merge between the first and third person, the filmmaker tries to remember this penetrating rupture that precipitated her into disarray. Between the smell of the warm sand and the sea she loves to look at, her soul has lost something of its candid bliss. Her shadow and her fleeting reflection thus wander through these places "sad and magical at the same time", in search of other ghosts that have fled in a dull and distant dislocation.

And this pier of Old Orchard, which she has visited a thousand times in person and in thought, is not without recalling the one of Marker, who also questioned the reality of memory and jumps in time, saying: "Nothing distinguishes memories from other moments: it is only later that they are recognized, by their scars."

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant