A woman with a deep love of the land, Yolande Simard Perrault sees her life as having been shaped by a planetary upheaval in Charlevoix, Quebec, millions of years ago. As enduring as the Canadian Shield, she’s a woman of strength and spirit, a child of the crater left by the meteor’s impact. This documentary portrays a determined woman who’s the reflection of a land created on an immense scale. She was the creative and life partner of filmmaker Pierre Perrault, who gave up everything to be by her side. The film charts the influence of her unquenchable dreams and her contribution to the building of a people’s collective memory. In a stream of images and words, Simard Perrault recounts the splendours of the landscape and the people who shaped it. Generous and boundless, she embarks on a quest for identity that nurtures and perpetuates the oeuvre of the man who breathed new life into Quebec cinema.

Yolande Simard Perrault is a woman of extraordinary spirit, impressively energetic at the age of 90. If she seems as strong and enduring as the Canadian Shield, surely it’s because of the fateful coup de foudre that linked her life forever with that of the great filmmaker Pierre Perrault.

That lightning-strike of love was as sudden as the meteor that struck near Baie-Saint-Paul, Charlevoix, some 400 million years ago, tearing an immense crater in the earth that extends as far the St. Lawrence River. The meteor shaped both the geography of the region and the psyche of its inhabitants. With that metaphor as their starting point, Nadine Beaudet and Danic Champoux paint an intimate portrait of a daring, determined woman who sees her life as the outcome of these earth-shaking upheavals. Daughter of  the Crater shows how a seismic love between two people led to a shift in the history of documentary film. Profoundly attached to the land, Yolande Simard Perrault became the lifelong partner and collaborator, then guardian of the memory, of the man who breathed new life into Quebec cinema.

Yolande’s story is a veritable love letter to the landscape, expressed in her own lyrical style.  Driven by an idea of the country, a vision she formed in communion with the sublime and inspired by nature, this uncompromising dreamer helped to create Quebec’s collective national identity. The starting point was her decisive meeting with Pierre Perrault, then a young Montreal lawyer, who left everything for a woman who would introduce him to the idea of a Québécois identity, and to the vernacular of her region. The filmmakers use excerpts from books and film to illustrate Yolande’s huge influence on the work of her creative and life partner, who presented a nation to the world through the heightened poetry of reality.

The documentary is structured around meetings with Yolande at her Montreal home and the family cottage on the St. Lawrence, facing Île aux Coudres. We see her walking through the landscape she loves so much, describing its splendours. Letters and photographs chart the exemplary journey of this modern woman, ahead of her time, who chose freedom early in life and made knowledge the core of her existence. An archaeologist by training and a keen botanist, Yolande carries us along in a flood of images and words, giving shape and structure to a landscape created on an immense scale.

This film is the happy result of a spontaneous collaboration between Nadine Beaudet and Danic Champoux, each a past winner of the annual Prix Pierre-et-Yolande-Perrault at the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma. Through this exploration of the memories of an exceptional woman, the filmmakers invite Quebeckers to re-embrace who they are and thus assure the continued life of their culture. In its desire to pass on this knowledge, the film could not be more timely. Thanks to the generosity of Yolande Simard Perrault, Daughter of the Crater celebrates the legacy of Pierre Perrault just as the NFB prepares to move to new premises in downtown Montreal—a way for the institution to sustain the memory of a man who held high the flame of a dream created by two pairs of hands, in the name of love.