No Story Here

« I didn’t like the business that men did. In the morning in my bed, I heard the mill-whistle that sounded everywhere across the sky above town; I looked outside; the men, the women, the young, they were all going to the factory in the cold with their poor lunches. Ah, it made me nauseous to think that some day, one fine morning of the Good Lord, I’d have to go with them into these big dirty places full of din and work that never ends. » Jack Kerouac, La nuit est ma femme (The Night is My Woman), February 1951.

These words, written in 1951 by a French Canadian born in New England, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Ti-Jean, seem to me—despite the temporal and geographical distance and all that differentiates industrial Lowell in the 1950s from working-class Hochelaga in the 1970s—to express the existential truth captured in the images of Lamothe and Gagné. The two film students at Concordia document the neighborhood in winter: dirty, poor, alive, skipping along like the tune of a harmonica, filled with a vitality so distinct that it feels particularly "French Canadian," if such a thing can be said about a community. It conveys an energy that is both desperate and comedic. This winter portrait radiates the tenderness of the filmmakers’ gaze, warming the heart and inspiring a desire to embrace this peculiar world around us, to protect it from misery and the damned work that never ends.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director