In this cinematic tour de force, Monique LeBlanc brings to the screen Louise Dupré’s 2011 Governor General’s Award-winning book of poetry, Plus haut que les flammes, recited in its entirety in the film by actress Violette Chauveau. Devastated by a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau, a woman, a grandmother, tries to go on living and caring for a child. Because beyond the worst man-made horrors there is childhood, through which all roads to the future must pass. Weaving different stories, different experiences and different landscapes together, from Auschwitz to Canada via the United States, Nicaragua and the Ukraine, the filmmaker offers a moving meditation on how we might elevate the youth that will inherit this world “higher than flames will go.”

Synopsis

A true cinematic tour de force, this auteur essay film is an adaptation of Plus haut que les flames, Louise Dupré’s 2011 Governor General’s Award-winning book of poetry. A moving meditation on the vital importance of taking care of our children—a task that remains essential to humanity’s salvation.

One-liner

An adaptation of Louise Dupré’s acclaimed book of poetry, Higher Than Flames Will Go is a moving meditation on the vital importance of taking care of our children, a task that remains essential to humanity’s salvation.

The films of Acadian director Monique LeBlanc often delve into other art forms; she turned her lens on painting, for example, in her portrait of the artist Roméo Savoie (Roméo Savoie: La peinture au corps, 2011). And in her most recent film, Higher Than Flames Will Go, she attends to the delicate reckonings required to match screen images to a poet’s words. In creating a visual complement to a poem sequence by Quebec writer Louise Dupré (the poetry collection, titled Plus haut que les flammes, was published in 2010 and appeared in English as Beyond the Flames), LeBlanc has achieved something that is not quite a video poem, not purely a documentary, not exactly a film about art. The film passes through all these categories without pausing for long in any one of them. Rather, the genres emerge in succession, interconnecting and responding to each other, borne along by the breathing life manifested in the poetry. Dupré’s art is gentle but unrelenting; it imprints itself over the work of LeBlanc, whose camera defers to this contagion of genres to harmonious effect. First of all, the work of the poet can be heard, in the voice of Violette Chaveau, who provides the spoken narrative. Never false, never overplayed, never caught up in mere pathos despite the deep seriousness of the subject matter, her reading of the poems is ideally pitched to balance the filmmaker’s vision. The multiplicity of genres might have created an impression of disorderliness—but it does the opposite.

Crafted with precision, Higher Than Flames Will Go is a film bathed in light—the tropical glow of summer sun, the sparkle of winter snow—both materially and symbolically.

LeBlanc performs a true high-wire act here, carefully juxtaposing archival footage of Auschwitz with more recent images captured in Louisiana, Nicaragua and Ukraine, where the camera records the day-to-day existence of parents who are no longer able to care for and protect their children. There are also countless images of nature, expressed with slow-motion and time-lapse effects. These shots of flowers, sunlight and expanses of water achieve a form of grace that, far from evoking transcendence or seeking to sublimate pain with beauty, instead calls us back to all the paradigms of the living. There are shots, for example, of live ants teeming on the ground and dead dragonflies in an empty house. There are tropical flowers, then a close-up of maggots swarming over a horse’s carcass. Between grace and abjection, nature as seen in Higher Than Flames Will Go is a mirror image of Dupré’s poems, which ask how one can go on living and caring for children today, changing their diapers, scolding them, loving them, while still keeping alive the memory of murdered Jewish children. Responding to Dupré’s work, LeBlanc weaves together beauty and horror: there is as much cruelty here as love. We see a small boy dressed as a superhero, talking about his mother who has died and will not return, despite his prayers, and his grandmother, bursting into sobs as she looks at pictures of her son and daughter-in-law, killed in an accident. Navigating between the private realm, where our intimate responsibilities lie—where a grandmother must take on the roles of mother and father—and the collective sphere, where all of humanity must contend with the weight of the Holocaust, Monique LeBlanc’s Higher Than Flames Will Go gives us nature as a reflection of human lives. Offering neither balm nor cure, the film shows how nature, poetry, families and genocides are bound together in an ecosystem without hierarchy, in a life cycle epitomized by the precious bonds that we nurture in spite of everything, in empathy that does not deny disaster. (Chloé Savoie-Bernard)

When I first read Louise Dupré’s Plus haut que les flammes (Beyond the Flames), I felt the same thing French publisher Bruno Doucey wrote a few years later about this text: “There are some books that stay with you forever.” I simply had to turn this piece into a film. But how would I make a film out of a poem? Out of this poem in particular? I had to find a filming approach or process in which words and images would become a unified language, an alliance that didn’t favour one at the expense of the other.

The poem begins with the lines “Your poem / rose from hell,” and the use of the possessive suggests that the text was drawn from the author’s real-life experience. So I drew inspiration from Dupré’s experience as a new grandmother to include a cinéma-vérité-style documentary component, featuring grandmothers and the grandchildren in their care.

Into the day-to-day lives of these extraordinary women, which generally consisted of very few things, I wove imagery drawn from nature, the world, and Auschwitz-Birkenau: images that I mostly chose instinctively, to communicate the hope and the despair, the beauty and the ugliness—in other words, the very polarities of the poem, between which the poet is torn as she fights relentlessly to protect and care for the child close to her.

So children are at the heart of my project, which is both a documentary and an art film. Whether it’s the grandchildren of the grandmothers—the children I was fortunate to meet and film—or the children we only see in photographs because they perished in the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, each of them inevitably leads us back to an imperative that’s more important than ever: the need to save our children, to hold them high, beyond the flames. Because only by saving them can we have any hope of saving the world.