His Excellency Jean-Daniel Lafond
Speech on the Occasion of a Visit to TOHU, la Cité des arts du cirque
Montréal, Friday, February 10, 2006
I stand before you today as both a filmmaker and the life and travel companion of the Governor General of Canada.
When I agreed to take on this role alongside my wife, I looked back over my life and the path taken by the immigrant I once was, who came to this country for the first time 32 years ago and became a Canadian citizen in 1981.
I asked myself two questions: How would I assume the title of Excellency, a title I had never before used except when addressing the few ambassadors I had met along the way? How would I accompany the Governor General in her role as ambassador for Canada across this country and throughout the world?
I found the answer in my journey as a documentary filmmaker: that of a French expatriate, who found his roots in Quebec by choosing to become a Canadian citizen while honouring his history and origins.
Documentary filmmaking has been my pilgrim’s staff. My first film, Les Traces du rêve, made me Québécois; it was a voyage into Quebec society, a journey of friendship and knowledge with the star, Pierre Perrault, one of the pivotal founders of contemporary documentary film at the National Film Board. I am profoundly attached to this film. Whenever I feel depressed, I always go back to Les Traces du rêve and come away feeling renewed, having found the courage to make another film.
From that moment, I understood that documentary film is a medium for discovering the Other, a cinema of knowledge and sharing with the public.
It led me to the woman who would become my wife while shooting a film with the great Black poet from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, 16 years ago. And so it was that Haiti imbued me with yet another identity.
While making Haïti dans tous nos rêves with writer and poet René Depestre, I understood that we could each of us have a multifaceted identity, a banyan-identity, like the tree of that name from Africa whose roots become its branches and its branches, its roots in an infinite circle. And so here I am, a Frenchman born and raised, rooted in Quebec North America, a Haitian by marriage and a Canadian citizen by choice.
For over 20 years, documentary filmmaking has been my philosopher’s staff. It has allowed me to go where I would never have ventured were I not making a film to explore identities, nationalism, exile, revolution, barbarism, the relationship between artist and politics, freedom, tolerance, racism, openness to others.
This is what came to me as I looked back over the films of my life. This is what has enabled me to stand before you, as the Governor General’s travel companion, with my history and my journey as a filmmaker in hand.
Finally, I am pleased to be here tonight to meet with young filmmakers who have chosen to express themselves through the documentary medium, the ultimate tool for the masses.
They have chosen this challenging profession that is so vital in this turbulent start to the 21st century.
They have chosen to explore the tragic flashes of existence; the beautiful, the unbearable.
They are seekers of meaning, modern-day prospectors: as unnecessary, as essential, like utopia and dreams.
I know that they are taking tremendous risks to give audiences a place where they are free to think and reflect, a unique story.
And I know, having lived it, living it still, that these days, in these uncertain and irrational times, more and more people are turning away from one-track thinking and are willing to embrace the film experience as a time to be worried, troubled, outraged, charmed. What they find is that they have an active role to play as subjects, as citizens.
I admire you and thank you for taking up the torch, and, if you will permit me, I will accompany you a little while longer: I have a film to show and another to wrap.
I still have one more mountain to climb.
