LA SUITE CANADIENNE
2023. 68 min. color
available for rental (with eng. sub.) on le Panoptique (until June 24, 2025)
on tenk.ca (with eng and fr subtitles) until October 7, 2024
AVEC / WITH : adam kinner, hanako hoshimi-caines, louise michel jackson, justin de luna, mulu tesfu, ève duranceau, dalie giroux, gilles castonguay, marie claire forté, ana tapia rousiouk.
ÉQUIPE / TEAM : montage, son et réalisation : olivier godin, direction photo : renaud després-larose, conception et production : adam kinner, musique : philippe melanson.
La suite canadienne is a collaborative documentary film made by the filmmaker Olivier Godin and the artist Adam Kinner. It depicts the efforts of a dance troupe to revisit a 1950s ballet in order to excavate its aesthetic, political and identarian project. They take a side entrance to history, believing that an amateur approach, with a good measure of freedom and humor might give them a new perspective on a history that otherwise seems foreclosed. Godin further destabilizes the project by bringing in actors to play historical roles and edits the film with a freewheeling, layered approach that gives us an intimate and complex perspective on the project.
From Jason Burnham on Tenk.ca:
“La suite canadienne offers a fascinating immersion into the creative process of a group of artists reinterpreting a sociologically significant television archive of our cultural heritage, namely the Radio-Canada recording of Ludmilla Chiriaeff’s eponymous ballet. Originally intended to be presented to the Queen of England to represent the brave French-Canadian nation, this choreography created at the dawn of the Quiet Revolution is here excavated and dusted off through an exploratory and experiential journey guided by dance, movement, bodies, and imperfect (thus free) gestures of a diverse group of dancers who visibly enjoy engaging in the game of reinterpretation.
Godin’s film, echoing the spirit of this artistic project led by Adam Kinner, also transforms into a true impressionist laboratory capturing thought in motion. Favoring a stance of total openness, the filmmaker wholeheartedly embraces unexpected trajectories, unusual exchanges, improbable encounters, incongruous, strange, funny, and surprising connections that come to life within the experience of creation. By chaining together experiments, subverting constraints, and embracing imperfections—letting them live instead of quietly discarding them—this new Suite canadienne radiates with a fertile poetry that seems to literally write itself before our eyes. For Godin, the act of creation always prevails.
Inviting and generous, far from any sterile hermeticism, La suite canadienne embodies the full power of an indocile cinema, a cinema finally freed from its shackles as we wish to experience more often.”