After San Francisco, Vancouver, then Toronto, it’s Montreal’s turn to be plunged into a merciless housing crisis. Two directors hand the microphone to some of its unfortunate main characters.
Here, brand new condo towers. There, and almost at their feet, scattered tents. It is with these shocking images, contrasting to say the least, that begins My evicted city, a committed documentary by Laurence Turcotte-Fraser (The End of Wonderland) and Priscillia Piccoli (Mathieu, Fond Bell prize), in theaters this Friday, in a cinema independent near you.
The two emerging directors launched a direct cinema project in the middle of a pandemic, following homeless people in a camp, workers in a day center and a group of residents threatened with eviction , notably. Objective: to offer an choral film, putting “humans”, their experiences and their emotions at the heart of the equation of an otherwise glaring current crisis.
You will have guessed it, the directors did not hesitate to re-share this unfortunate declaration from Prime Minister François Legault, in 2021, according to whom housing in Montreal would supposedly start “from $500 to $600 per person”. month… “
Quite a roll of the dice: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser and Priscillia Piccoli have set their sights here on the residents of Manoir Lafontaine, a story, remember, which made the headlines in 2021, which has come to embody the tenants’ fight against renovictions. A story, above all, with a happy ending, which gives a common thread to a film which, in parts, slightly lacks one.
“We especially wanted to give voice to people who were resisting,” explains Laurence Turcotte-Fraser in an interview, in a small café on rue Saint-Viateur where their project was born. We wanted to follow people who wanted to change things. Maybe I’m optimistic or idealistic, but I thought that maybe this could result in something beautiful. »
Big risk, when we know how stories of evictions due to renovations generally end badly.
It was also driven by a deep feeling of injustice and a thirst for humanity that the two directors embarked on this shoot: Priscillia Piccoli, after having herself volunteered in a day center for people in a homeless situation (“I needed to find humanity, I wanted to help!”), and Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, who first thought of doing something about the phenomenon in Vancouver, before changing his mind, current affairs require. “I have a friend who was doing a master’s degree in sociology on the phenomenon of homelessness in British Columbia, I planned to make a film on it, I started my research, and then the pandemic arrived and I realized it was happening in Montreal! »
What exactly ? “When people with essential jobs in cities can no longer live there and raise their families,” she summarizes, “because real estate becomes an investment lever. […] It’s a hyper-speculative phenomenon that happened in the middle of a global pandemic. »
“Our film is a cry from the heart,” adds Priscillia Piccoli, “we made it urgently, because we saw it coming! »
It’s not making this up, in the middle of filming, Laurence Turcotte-Fraser lost her home, a few streets from where we are sitting for the interview, rue de l’Esplanade. “I received my eviction notice on December 23, and I panicked,” she remembers. I realized: I’m not home. But I’m not as strong as the people at Manoir Lafontaine, because I didn’t fight. »
However, with their film, the two directors, who plead for new housing laws, the construction of affordable housing and, above all, their quantification (“what is affordable housing?”), here hope to raise awareness a little. “We are a canary in the mine,” they conclude. But we don’t want to wait. The longer we wait, the more people there will be in poverty. And we don’t want to live in a society like that. »
