March 14, 2019 – Montreal – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
The world premiere of Loïc Darses’ feature documentary La fin des terres (Where the Land Ends) took place in a packed house of deeply moved viewers on the closing night of the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (RVQC). The film will be opening in Quebec City at Cinéma Cartier on Friday, March 22, after a series of sold-out screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal that began on March 12. The English-subtitled version of the film will begin screening at Montreal’s Cinéma Moderne on March 22, and the director and some of the film’s creative crew will be in attendance for several of these showings. A tour is planned for the spring, with special screenings to be held throughout Quebec. Produced at the NFB by Colette Loumède, this poignant film takes an uncompromising stance in exploring the political, territorial, and identity issues of our time in Quebec, from the perspective of a group of millennials.
About the film (90 min)
The NFB is pleased to announce its partnership with Nouveau Projet magazine to promote screenings of La fin des terres.
La fin des terres gives voice to 17 young people with diverse backgrounds who were born too late to vote in Quebec’s 1995 sovereignty referendum. The film uses only their voices, superimposed over footage of significant sites in Quebec’s history, devoid of people, including Calvary in Oka, the Grand Mosque of Quebec City, the Manic-5 Dam, Kahnawake, the hill on Berri St., Olympic Stadium, the shores of the Gaspé, and the National Assembly. No archival footage was used.
Faced with the previous generation’s failure to settle issues such as identity, nationhood, Indigenous peoples’ place in society, land appropriation, and the environment, these millennials, selected because they’ve pondered these questions, speak powerfully and aptly about the current state of affairs, which is felt rather than stated outright. It’s as if these young people were seeking to make room for what Quebec might become. Featuring the voices of Maïtée Labrecque-Saganash, Jean-François Ruel (a.k.a. Yes Mccan), Carl Bergeron, Nora Loreto, Mélanie Hotchkiss, Lucia Carballo, Sibel Ataogul, Jade Barshee, Aurélie Lanctôt, Catherine Dorion, Jonathan Durand Folco, Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Pierre-Luc Brisson, Alexandre Leduc, Léane Labrèche-Dor, Patricia Boushel, and Clara L’Heureux-Garcia.
About the filmmaker
Loïc Darses directed Elle pis son char (2015), a short documentary that won several awards and was selected to screen at Sundance. He created an acclaimed and powerful film that has been called “unclassifiable, an original, disturbing, intimate, violent and tender road movie” (Patrick Lagacé). In 2019, Darses is back with La fin des terres, where we encounter the same concern for inheritance, the passing of the baton, identity quest and the same poetic desire to draw the viewer into endless landscapes. He is now at work on a new short film, his first venture into fiction, Cercueil, tabarnak!
The origin of the project
The film came out of the Repêchage initiative, for which NFB producer Colette Loumède (producer of Luc Bourdon’s The Memories of Angels and The Devil’s Share) recruited three promising graduates in three different streams of UQAM’s media school to work together on their first professional film—director Loïc Darses, editor Philippe Lefebvre, and cinematographer Charlotte Lacoursière, joined partway through the filming by another cinematographer, Louis Turcotte.
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Related Products
Electronic Press Kit | Images, trailers, synopsis: Where the Land Ends | Trailer here.
Associated Links
Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma
Cinéma Cartier
Nouveau Projet magazine
UQAM’s media school