Dr. Yves Rainville (Jacques Godin) has been serving the community of Normétal in the Abitibi region of Quebec for forty years, and has seen it go from a thriving mining town to a nearly empty dot on the map. Increasingly ill himself, Yves advertises for a temporary replacement, hoping to find his successor. Dr. Jeanne Dion (Élise Guilbault) answers his ad and makes the trip from the city to the country looking for a more personal medical practice than her current position in a busy emergency room. She soon discovers that while there may be fewer patients in Normétal, they require a deeper commitment, from the sixteen-year-old girl seeking an abortion to the wealthy and secluded businessman who uses his helicopter to fly Jeanne in for check-ups. Yves offers advice as he prepares his last gift to the community he has healed for so long.
La Donation is a deeply emotional and stirring film from Quebec auteur Bernard Émond. The final work in his humanist trilogy (following La Neuvaine and Contre toute espérance), it expands on the series' themes of faith, fate and healing. Émond's graceful script enhances his distinctively subtle visual approach and is aided by a quiet but moving score from Robert Marcel Lepage. Powering the movie are the stunning and knowing performances by Godin and Guilbault, two of Quebec's finest actors, who are perfectly at home in Émond's filmic landscape.
Inspired partially by Émond's own love for the picturesque region, as well as legendary filmmaker Gilles Groulx's documentary on the town (simply titled Normétal), La Donation is a remembrance of a more pristine past, when small towns thrived on money from natural resources, and doctors made house calls. Émond urges that connections be remade between people and place, and more urgently between each other, in order for us to recognize once again the beauty and shared bond of existence. A movie very much about a Canada and Quebec long left to black-and-white documentaries, La Donation proposes that these times are not lost but simply misplaced in the rush toward “progress” and urbanization; for them to come back, we need only to pause, look and embrace our surroundings. La Donation is a movie that moves the soul, and in doing so, may move us to return to a more human age.
Jesse Wente
Bernard Émond was born in Montreal and studied anthropology. He has contributed to more than thirty films as director, screenwriter and editor. His extensive work as a documentary filmmaker includes
Ceux qui ont le pas léger meurent sans laisser de traces (92),
L'Instant et la patience (94),
La Terre des autres (95),
L'Épreuve du feu (97) and
Le Temps et le lieu (00). He has directed the acclaimed feature films
La Femme qui boit (01),
20h17, rue Darling (03),
La Neuvaine (05),
Contre toute espérance (07) and
La Donation (09).