Alterity sometimes offer us a surprising angle on the real world, an altered perception that shows us our blind spots, shadowy places, and other unknowns that never seem to appear in the reflection we see in the mirror. When Brault filmed young girls as they spoke and got excited, dreamed and got afraid, he captured the intangibility of that age with startling accuracy. If “no fifteen-year-old’s heart can be read like an open book”, Brault reads the hearts of his young heroines through their shared glances, their stifled laughter, and their hesitant steps towards growing older. He speaks of teenagers with the rightful tears of that age, the crises of faith, the tender hope tinting our vision of the life to come that we eagerly await and shy away from at the same time.
Brault hoped to make “cinema of experience”. The first foray into “fiction” that he made as a documentarist, this film is packed with life to the point of overflowing the frame. Witness to a Quebec in full bloom, he brought a breath of fresh air to the screen that comes through to this day. With May ’68 on the horizon and the Quiet Revolution underway, hordes of young people would soon stream in to dramatically change the Québécois’ way of life. The End of Summer almost mirrors a paradise lost: the carelessness of young Baby Boomers, to whom the world briefly seemed to belong.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk’s Artistic Director