Express News Service
In a note on his second feature film, Gamma Rays, Canadian filmmaker Henry Bernadet talks about growing up in a “deeply white and monocultural” suburb of Quebec City and how a move to Montreal sparked his interest in youth from cultures and communities, backgrounds and histories widely different from his own.
So, he trains his camera on a group of contemporary Montreal’s immigrant adolescents in the film. Despite being a stranger to this world, Bernadet’s gaze is not that of an outsider. Never once does he portray his motley group of characters as the other. He is very much one with them, as though embedded within to help vitalise their lived reality on screen in a film that throbs with wonderful authenticity, empathy, warmth and humanism.
Gamma Rays is about the young who might be on the margins of the city’s consciousness today but are the cornerstone of its essential diversity. The everyday upheavals in their lives and the existentialist angst could resonate with the young and restless in any part of the world, but their problems are also distinctly defined by issues of roots, race, nationality and identity. The second generation of immigrants, fighting for survival and integration to be the driving force in the Quebec of tomorrow. As a Somalian born in Canada wonders in a casual conversation with his friend—is he a Quebecois, a Montrealer or a Somalian?
There’s Abdel (Yassine Jabrane), quietly resentful and jealous of the visiting cousin from Morocco who, with his extroverted ways, gets popular among his friends. Outspoken Fatima (Chaima Zinedine) can’t help speaking her mind to badly behaved customers though her job as a supermarket cashier demands diplomacy and tact. Will she be able to work in a senior home where her hair is called out as “African”? Or will she take a more violent and troubled way out? Toussaint (Chris Kanyembuga), while fishing, finds life taking a new direction when he chances upon a bottle with a message inside. Then there is innocent Naima (Oceane Garcon-Gravel) who resists the offensiveness of others towards her. Each of these youngsters makes you feel one with their world, each one of them stays in your mind and heart long after the film is over.
Bernadet brings together a handpicked, amazingly fresh and memorable ensemble. Gamma Rays, a mix of docudrama and fiction, is truly a hybrid film in that it draws from the lives and stories of a bunch of youngsters that Bernadet closely worked with for over two years and whom he also turns into the protagonists. But not once do these non-professional actors betray the fact that they are amateurs. Bernadet builds the narrative through a series of little vignettes or slices of life. The daily rhythms get disrupted, newer balances are stuck and fresh insights are gained by the young on the journey called life.
He shoots it like a documentary—a natural setting, with real people, talking the way they do, being who they are instead of trying to become someone else. Even the texture of fantasy and the truly fantastic—the remote-controlled car, the electric locusts and the powerful rays that expose individual fragility while they also bind—is rooted in the specificity of the neighbourhoods in Montreal, their idiosyncratic denizens and their wacky adventures, the quizzes they participate in, the football players they idolise and the snails they admire for having the ability to sleep for years together. A deceptively simple but deeply felt experience.
In a note on his second feature film, Gamma Rays, Canadian filmmaker Henry Bernadet talks about growing up in a “deeply white and monocultural” suburb of Quebec City and how a move to Montreal sparked his interest in youth from cultures and communities, backgrounds and histories widely different from his own.
So, he trains his camera on a group of contemporary Montreal’s immigrant adolescents in the film. Despite being a stranger to this world, Bernadet’s gaze is not that of an outsider. Never once does he portray his motley group of characters as the other. He is very much one with them, as though embedded within to help vitalise their lived reality on screen in a film that throbs with wonderful authenticity, empathy, warmth and humanism.
Gamma Rays is about the young who might be on the margins of the city’s consciousness today but are the cornerstone of its essential diversity. The everyday upheavals in their lives and the existentialist angst could resonate with the young and restless in any part of the world, but their problems are also distinctly defined by issues of roots, race, nationality and identity. The second generation of immigrants, fighting for survival and integration to be the driving force in the Quebec of tomorrow. As a Somalian born in Canada wonders in a casual conversation with his friend—is he a Quebecois, a Montrealer or a Somalian?googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });
There’s Abdel (Yassine Jabrane), quietly resentful and jealous of the visiting cousin from Morocco who, with his extroverted ways, gets popular among his friends. Outspoken Fatima (Chaima Zinedine) can’t help speaking her mind to badly behaved customers though her job as a supermarket cashier demands diplomacy and tact. Will she be able to work in a senior home where her hair is called out as “African”? Or will she take a more violent and troubled way out? Toussaint (Chris Kanyembuga), while fishing, finds life taking a new direction when he chances upon a bottle with a message inside. Then there is innocent Naima (Oceane Garcon-Gravel) who resists the offensiveness of others towards her. Each of these youngsters makes you feel one with their world, each one of them stays in your mind and heart long after the film is over.
Bernadet brings together a handpicked, amazingly fresh and memorable ensemble. Gamma Rays, a mix of docudrama and fiction, is truly a hybrid film in that it draws from the lives and stories of a bunch of youngsters that Bernadet closely worked with for over two years and whom he also turns into the protagonists. But not once do these non-professional actors betray the fact that they are amateurs. Bernadet builds the narrative through a series of little vignettes or slices of life. The daily rhythms get disrupted, newer balances are stuck and fresh insights are gained by the young on the journey called life.
He shoots it like a documentary—a natural setting, with real people, talking the way they do, being who they are instead of trying to become someone else. Even the texture of fantasy and the truly fantastic—the remote-controlled car, the electric locusts and the powerful rays that expose individual fragility while they also bind—is rooted in the specificity of the neighbourhoods in Montreal, their idiosyncratic denizens and their wacky adventures, the quizzes they participate in, the football players they idolise and the snails they admire for having the ability to sleep for years together. A deceptively simple but deeply felt experience.