[MONTRÉAL] Chloé Germain-Therien dropped by this afternoon and showed me film work she collaborated on (with Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette) to create a music video for Algonquin rapper Samian.
Chloé is a former member of Les Lucioles, which was an active videoactivist collective (2002-2007) that produced more than 20 video compilations of short films that tackled local and international issues like immigration & refugee status, The World Trade Organization & globalization, queer rights & gender ambiguity, politics & the right to free education, among other subjects. Chloé was the collective’s finest illustrator who incorporated her images as animation within her films.
In her 20-minute documentary, Écho du silence (2005), about the tragic deportation from Canada of two Basque refugees, Chloé shares her emotional attachment to the situation of Eduardo Plagaro Perez de Arrilucea and Gorka Perea Salazar by adding hand-drawn illustrations as animated sequences to the film.
A recurring scene that illustrates Gorka’s 2002 phone interview from within Rivière-des-Prairies Detention Centre — with its encroaching coal pencil strokes depicting the solitude and desperation of unjust incarceration and torture-induced confessions — brings the viewer into the darkness of someone wrongfully accused of arson and sentenced like a terrorist.
In the last minutes of the film, the continuation of the same charcoal images return during the reading from a letter written on Feb. 21, 2005 by Eduardo from his cell at Rivières-des-Prairies prison, written prior to their June 4th extradition from Canada. This time hope is introduced into the animation with the emergence of yellow in the dark prison cell’s window. The narration reads from the letter, “…they will never be able to imprison our energies and our creativity, our power and our thirst for justice and equity…” The prisoner figure then takes on a yellow hue while rising from a crouched position, growing wings and leaving the hovel into the light. It is probably Chloé’s best work within the Lucioles.
Chloé’s latest animation work is as co-director of the Samian videoclip from his second single: Les Nomades (2008), from his first album, “Face à soi-même”. This yet-to-be-finished working copy that Chloé came to show me, is her first music video. The musician, Samian, is particularly interesting because he is from the Pikogan community in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region of Québec — more than 500 kms north of Montréal — where he was born in 1983. He is the first in Québec to rap in both French and Algonquin languages. His collaboration with Loco Locas on the track “La paix des braves” from the same album has increased his popularity and presence on Montréal stages.
Chloé’s ability to tell a story with her moving images go well with the music and its theme of colonialism on Indigenous land.
