Hughes Mignault

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."

Here is the village of Ste-Justine as one gifted man, novelist and playwright Roch Carrier, remembers it. In this small corner of Québec there is space in the landscape and in the vast spread of forest, but the fringe of rocks around every field speaks of the backbreaking hardship that was the lot of Carrier's father and of his grandfather before him. This is a nostalgic view of rural Québec.

This film covers the transitional political period between the election of the Parti Québécois on November 15, 1976, and the Canadian federal election that brought Joe Clark to power. Featuring some of our most colourful politicians, historians, journalists, artists and citizens, this film highlights in parallel the convictions of each on the national political question, on the eve of the first Quebec referendum. Montage of newsreels shot between the election of the Parti Québécois on November 15, 1976, and the federal election of 1979.