Rattrapage culturel : quels sont les essentiels à lire et voir ?

My story with Cana­dian cin­ema didn’t start very well. When I first came here, Feng dragged me to see Men with Brooms. Keep­ing in mind I barely spoke Eng­lish and didn’t know much about Canada, I auto­mat­i­cally assumed it was a com­edy about… guys doing house­keep­ing, a bit like Mrs. Doubt­fire. Well, turned out it was a movie about curl­ing. I didn’t even know curl­ing was a sport.

For­tu­nately, over the years, we saw other movies that I actu­ally under­stood this time, notably the excel­lent East­ern Promises (directed by David Cro­nen­berg), The Bar­bar­ian Inva­sions (directed byDenis Arcand), and The Trot­sky (by Jacob Tier­ney).
But I must admit I have a fond­ness for bilin­gual comedies.
When I watched Bon Cop/Bad Cop in 2006, I laughed so hard I must have missed half of the lines. So I watched it again. And Again. And it still makes me laugh. This is the story of an Ontar­ian and a Québé­cois police offi­cer who reluc­tantly join forces to inves­ti­gate on a body found hang­ing on top of the sign demar­cat­ing the Ontario-Quebec bor­der. The dia­logue is a mix­ture of Eng­lish and French—literally, as both char­ac­ters are bilin­gual. The movie plays on stereo­types Québé­cois and Eng­lish Cana­di­ans have about each other’s. As Kevin Tier­ney, the script writer of the movie explains:“The fran­coph­o­nes said that while the French char­ac­ters were a bit clichéd, we had really got the anglo char­ac­ters down. Yeah, every­one in Eng­lish Canada wears a turtle­neck and is con­sti­pated. In Eng­lish Canada, peo­ple said we had overused anglo stereo­types, but con­grats on get­ting those French char­ac­ters down.”
I recently went to see another bilin­gual com­edy by the same script writer: French Immer­sion. This time, four anglo Canucks and a New Yorker head to the fic­tional north­ern Que­bec town of Saint-Isidore-du-Coeur-de-Jésus for, guess what, French immer­sion and inten­sive lan­guage classes. A bar­rage of cul­ture clashes ensue between the rural folks in Que­bec, the Indian restau­rant owner, the Jew­ish anglo­phone, an ambi­tious politi­cian and many other char­ac­ters. You can see the trailer and other videos on the movie web­site.
These movies are very fun because they revolve around Cana­dian cul­ture and stereo­types: the two lone­li­ness between Que­bec and the so-called ROC (Rest of Canada), reli­gion, politics—and yes, hockey.
In another cat­e­gory, Rob Spence, a film maker based in Toronto, is another inter­est­ing Cana­dian to fol­low. I got to know his work through Let’s All Hate Toronto, a tongue-in-cheek doc­u­men­tary explor­ing the rea­sons why every­one in Canada seems to hate Toronto (and the Maple Leafs).
Rob Spence lost an eye as a kid after gun back­fired on him. He even­tu­ally had his dis­fig­ured eye removed a few years ago and decided to take the oppor­tu­nity to become Eye­borg. Inspired by sci­ence fic­tion, he vowed to replace his pros­thetic eye by a video cam­era, not to regain sight but to record the world from a new per­spec­tive. He also dabs into cyber­net­ics, human aug­men­ta­tion, bionic parts and our sur­veil­lance soci­ety with a great sense of humour. Over the years, the eye­cam pro­to­type built by his slightly insane team was improved and frankly, it’s both scary and fas­ci­nat­ing to watch him watch you. You can watch a bunch of videos about “the eye­borg” here and read a good inter­view of Rob Spence here.
So if you are a prospec­tive immi­grant, a new­comer or sim­ply inter­ested into Cana­dian cul­ture, check out these movies and these direc­tors. They will sur­prise you!