Special dossier: Space and Place in the Work of Contemporary Québécois Filmmakers

Abstract

Regional space in Quebec cinema has long been associated with the vestiges of French-Canadian Catholic identity. A body of films in the 2000s by well-known filmmakers challenges this traditional iconography and imagines the Quebec region as not only a site of socio-economic crisis and stagnation but of cultural transmission and spiritual renewal. The protagonists in Louis Belanger’s Route 132 and Bernard Emond’s La neuvaine/The Novena (2005) and La donation/The Legacy (2009) find meaning and solace in rural/regional spaces (farm houses, religious sites, declining mining towns) outside of their own personal experience. Rather than reading this return to the rural and quest for “home” as exemplary of a conservative reaction to urban cosmopolitanism, this article will argue for the region in these films as a potentially productive site from which to rethink a postmodern, post-Catholic Quebec. Using theories of critical regionalism that view local or rooted cultures as constantly interrupted by external force...