Retired Innu schoolteacher and author, Anne-Marie St-Onge André is a thoughtful, intelligent, lively woman, full of humour, yet pondering lives lived. She can’t entirely accept her husband’s death and, through her « simple words », we come to comprehend the depth of her pain, rage and love for him.

All his life, despite his own skills and inner strengths, her husband, Jacques André, faced racism and contempt from Whites. Poetic in his sensibility and marked in childhood by the violence perpetrated in Native residential schools, he slowly killed himself by drinking and smoking.

Jade, 22, fragile and strong, spent her childhood in Schefferville near Anne-Marie and her family. Unloved, she had a tough adolescence and often tried to « end it ». Now the mother of a baby boy named Pinashue, she visits Anne-Marie. The women engage in a heartfelt exchange of shared recollections, then recent life experiences.

Their discourse, supported by an intimate narration and set in a lonely, Northern-Québec landscape of enduring beauty, gives voice to quiet, resilient, loving individuals – past, present and future.

51 minutes, 2009

With 

Anne-Marie Saint-Onge André

Jade McKenzie

Direction, camera, editing

Lucie Lambert

Sound 

Claude Beaugrand

Dialogue Editing

Francine Poirier

Narration written by

Jean Pierre Girard 

Lucie Lambert

Footage of Jacques André in 2004

Christian M. Fournier                        

« Blowin’ in the Wind » 

composed by Bob Dylan

Interpreted by

Claude McKenzie

Excerpt from « Aimititau! Parlons-nous! »                                    

written and read by Anne-Marie St-Onge André

© Éditions Mémoire d’encrier

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