Synopsis
This feature documentary represents a quest that is both personal and universal. Director Claude Demers revisits the working-class neighbourhood of Verdun where he grew up and asks questions about the mysteries of his origins and his formative years, which were marked by abandonment. Bastien and Cédric, two young boys who are discovering the world around them, serve as the narrator’s alter egos. Between past and present, birth and death, Where I’m From traces the course of one man’s redemption. The film marries realism with lyricism and a vibrant soundtrack that celebrates life.
A word from Tënk
Claude Demers’ documentary films are all about memory, whether it’s his two odes to his adoptive parents (Barbers: A Men’s Story and Ladies in Blue) or, more explicitly, in his later films, which focused on his quest to learn more about his origins and explore his childhood. But Demers is no narcissist : this research is always accompanied by plays on intersubjectivity (both the real, as in Where I’m From and the collective unconscious of Quebec film archives in A Woman, My Mother).
Where I’m From participates in a process of anamnesis (“I feel like I’ve left a part of myself here—something that might never have existed but that I’d like to get back”), where the past intrudes on the present and identity blurs into alter ego. The film is tinged throughout with a powerful dose of saudade, which Eduardo Lourenço defined as a way of “being present in the past, or being past in the present.” This osmosis between the contemporary and the past find common ground in the film’s description of the filmmaker’s shock upon being told, as a child, that God was eternal, without beginning nor end.
It’s also a reflection on a place in time, with a sly stink eye toward gentrification—in particular that taking place on Nuns’ Island, which, 44 years after Hell No Longer, continues to roll out the welcome mat for the ostentatious wealthy.
Richard Brouillette
Savior, filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant
