Mireille Dansereau

At the end of the year 1961, three young students, Denys Arcand, Denis Héroux and Stéphane Venne, decide to direct a feature-length film centered on the perks of student life. The film mixes fiction and reality in the style of cinéma vérité. "Alone or with others" is often considered the first indepent film of Québec.

What do we know about childhood other than the constructions we make of it? A little girl died inside the day her father left. As an adult, she is still there, frozen, stuck in the sand, ready to dissolve in the storm of her childhood. But is he really gone? Can memory lie to us? A film where characters from the past are transformed into actors in the present. A cinematic essay, based on images that the filmmaker has filmed over the years and family archives dating from the 1940s, all shot in the same place, on the same beach in Old Orchard, Maine, USA.

Paddling a kayak on a Quebec lake, a woman remembers her son and the first time he saw himself in a mirror. Having been able to accompany him in this event, the reminiscence brings her great joy. Mireille Dansereau has produced a personal film in which the autobiographical dimension cohabits with an exploratory treatment of light, space and memory traces.