Archipelago is an absolute art work. A hybrid film that blends documentary images with animated ones to articulate a man and a woman’s visceral and poetic dialogue, and assert the past and future history of a people and its territory. “You don’t know me well and therefore underestimate me, like the river and its islands”. It is thus that the plot of this journey is woven, in which the woman implores with all her might to believe despite the refusals of her counterpart, who resigns himself to “the whole world becoming suburbia”. Always present is this figure of a woman who weds the hills falling into the river, a woman-territory, a window through which we explore the history of the islands of Quebec. Revisiting in passing other recognizable silhouettes, including that of an illustrious doctor in Ville Jacques-Cartier who “tended to simple bodies and wrote ambitious words”. And it is exactly this ambitious nature of the film which overwhelms the viewer. Thanks to its animation, there is no limit to what this film poem invokes. It embroiders and invents the threads and words of an inextricable story and territory and reminds us, with panache, of all that cinema can do. It dreams up to this great river and its thousand islands.

Jean-Philippe Catellier
Programming and Broascasting Manager
Paraloeil

Presented in collaboration with