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Canadian director Louise Archambault presents in official selection at the San Sebastián International Film Festival "It was raining birds", her latest feature film adapted from a novel by Jocelyne Saucier, praised by many awards when it was released in 2011. Around the themes of freedom and love, the film questions us: what is the greatest freedom that can exist? To choose one's life? to choose his death? to fall in love at 80? to start over three times his life? In the forest hide beautiful stories.
Special envoy to San Sebastián,
When there are big fires in Canadian forests, it rains birds, smothered by smoke and heat. An old woman, interviewed by a reporter who investigates the Great Fire that marked and bereaved her generation, tells how a bird fell on her head when she was a young girl.
But it's not just fire that suffocates. There are also conventions, bourgeois morality, religion. Gertrude will pay the price. When we meet her in the movie, she is almost 80 years old. Her family stole her life by making her intern at the age of 16 because as a teenager, she was at her head and played the extra-lucid diviner.
The old woman, brilliantly interpreted by the actress Andrée Lachapelle -figure of the Quebec theater-, is the central character of the film. Around her gravitate all the other characters, young and old. The life of the small community in which she burst, fleeing the asylum in which she was locked up by force, will be upset.
Became Marie des Neiges, a fairy-tale first name, she joins a group of hermits in their hiding place in the deep forest. Originally, there were three, Charlie, Tom and Boychuck. Three men, who had chosen to live outside the world, at the half-time of their lives, each for a reason of their own: mourning, illness, alcoholism ...
Boychuck, the eldest, is a mysterious painter, whose entire family died in the Great Fire. He paints painful canvases, braziers and charred trunks. Sometimes a touch of yellow, the color of love according to Marie des Neiges, which is always a little showy. Tom, he drinks more than reason, breaks everything he touches and sings blues while accompanying his guitar. Charlie, the third man of the woods, traps rabbits and takes Marie des Neiges under his wing.
There is no age to learn to live
In contact with her new companions, Marie des Neiges, will learn to live, to love, to swim even. The lake where they bathe is the center of their universe and their bath of youth. She will also discover the desire and pleasure alongside Charlie in a nature magnified by the summer lights and the photography of Mathieu Laverdière, " my poet of the image " as the director says beautifully. The forest is friendly, bursting with songs of birds and insects.
But the past will again invite itself into the present and threaten the serenity of the trio. The fire in the distance roars. We are born, we live and we die, and in the end what is life, questions Louise Archambault. " Every human being expects three things in life," says the director, "to love, to be loved and to find dignity ". Dignity can be found in the assumed choice of one's life, one's loves, in the choice of one's death too. These are the choices of Gabrielle, the character of the previous feature film Louise Archambault, who wanted to live his love story with Martin despite his disability. These are the choices of Tom, Marie des Neiges and Charlie. And finally a beautiful lesson of life filmed with a lot of tenderness and modesty.
► See also : The San Sebastian Festival pays tribute to Costa-Gavras
It was raining birds from Post-Modern on Vimeo.