1 IN EARLY MAY 1979, 275 STUDENTS FROM THE ACADIAN TOWN of Rogersville, New Brunswick, were riveted by a screening in their school of the documentary film Kouchibouguac, which told the story of the expropriation of more than 200 families to make way for a national park of the same name along the province’s eastern shore, roughly 50 kilometres away. This was one of 30 screenings that constituted the debut tour of the film, a production of the Office national du film du Canada.1 Over 5,000 Acadians from all corners of New Brunswick, as well as from several Acadian communities in Nova Scotia, viewed Kouchibouguac in school auditoriums, parish halls, and community centres. Rhéal Drisdelle, the ONF representative who accompanied the tour, reported that the Rogersville screening generated "le plus d’intérêt et d’enthousiasme. Malgré le jeune âge du public, il y eut un silence complet pendant la durée du film. La période de question a durée deux heures! Ils s’intéressent surtout aux possibilités de solutions du problème Kouchibouguac et des mesures à prendre afin d’assurer qu’une telle situation ne se reproduise pas."2

2 "Le problème Kouchibouguac" that captured the attention of audiences wherever the film was shown was already a decade old at the time of the screenings. The story began in 1969 when the New Brunswick and federal governments agreed to create a park about 100 kilometres north of Moncton. According to the regulations in place at the time for the creation of national parks, Fredericton would clear out all the residents from the territory, with Ottawa then following with the funds to develop the park. While Parks Canada was looking for an opportunity to protect a unique environment, with wildlife and landscapes that might otherwise be endangered, the province saw the chance to provide employment in Kent County – the poorest county in New Brunswick and by any standard one of the poorest in Canada. Louis Robichaud, the first Acadian elected as premier of the province (1960-1970), envisioned jobs within the park, as well as other employment in the immediate vicinity, to serve the tourists who would be attracted.

3 If the story had ended here, there would have been little to hold the attention of the school children in Rogersville, or their counterparts – both young and old – in other Acadian communities. After all, the story of people being expropriated for some larger "public good" was one that had played itself out on many occasions in post-Second World War Canada in the establishment of national parks as well as in the construction of dams and airports and sometimes just to remove eyesores from the landscape (as those in power viewed some situations).3 But what made the Kouchibouguac case unique – and the reason why Acadians turned out to watch a film about the park’s creation – was the fact that on this occasion a significant number of the expropriated, mostly Acadians, resisted the efforts to remove them. Civil disobedience during the 1970s prevented the formal opening of the park until early 1979 – only months before the release of the film – and it continued for some time after that. Jackie Vautour, the most prominent protester who not only became the public face of the crisis but the leading figure in the film, never agreed to abandon his land and continues to live there as I write these lines 40 years after the Kouchibouguac saga began.4

4 Civil disobedience against the forced removal of a population from its land would have been exceptional in any Canadian context; but it had a particular cultural resonance for Acadians, whose history had been marked by the first modern example of "ethnic cleansing" – their removal at the hands of the British in the 18th century. For over two centuries following the deportation (or grand dérangement) Acadians largely viewed themselves as embodying the spirit of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, who bore her suffering stoically. In 1955, on the bicentenary of the deportation, Acadian leaders were almost apologetic about causing any offence to English-speakers who might have felt that they were being blamed for the deportation, but this reluctance to speak too loudly or forcefully in public was starting to change by the time of the Kouchibouguac affair.5 Acadian students took to the streets during the late 1960s and the decade that followed in support of the French language and control over their own education; some community leaders created the short-lived Parti acadien, whose members wanted New Brunswick divided into two provinces – one of which would have been primarily populated by Acadians – and whose 1979 convention provided the venue for one of the public screenings of Kouchibouguac.6

5 The Kouchibouguac affair provided yet another opportunity for some – but by no means all – Acadians to show support for those in their midst who were willing to stand up to authority, and so the cause of the expropriés became the subject for artistic creations at the time in such media as music, literature, sculpture, and – of course – film.7 Invariably, the story of those who were removed from their lands was constructed as an Acadian one; this was in spite of the fact that roughly 15 per cent of the dispossessed had been English-speakers. However, this linguistic minority largely settled with the government at an early point in the process, thus allowing the story to take on a certain Acadian nationalist tinge.

6 In the case of media other than film, the costs involved with telling the Kouchibouguac story were relatively modest. But producing a documentary was another matter altogether, with significant expenses connected with equipment, film stock, and crew. In the end, the budget for Kouchibouguac ran to over $130,000, and so could only be supported by an institution such as the ONF. Here, Acadians found that their efforts to tell a story of their own butted up against the influence of the Québécois at the film board’s head office in Montreal, who often made it difficult for other French Canadians to communicate their own stories on film. The conflicts that emerged between Acadiens and Québécois in regard to Kouchibouguac provide the focus for the greater part of this article.

7 The final section also deals with conflicts related to Kouchibouguac, but here the focus turns to divisions within the Acadian community over the story that was told. The film was made available almost exclusively to an Acadian audience in New Brunswick, but within that audience there emerged the same divisions that existed within Acadian society at large over such issues as whether it made more sense to work within the system (an approach embodied by Louis Robichaud) or from outside (as embodied by Jackie Vautour and his supporters). As played out in public, the debate often pertained to whether the film had presented all the "facts." In one such case, following the highly successful screening of the film before 1,200 students at the high school in Edmundston (far from the scene of the expropriations), one student observed in the school’s newspaper that he regretted that too many of the facts "n’ont pas été présentés."8 However, no documentary can ever present all the facts, and so the debate over Kouchibouguac within la famille acadienne was really about the choice of which facts needed to be told and which public face Acadians wanted to present – Robichaud’s or Vautour’s.

8 In the end, this article is largely about the politics of documentary filmmaking: which stories are told, who gets to tell them, how they are told, and how they are received by an audience. Along the way, the conflicts that were at the heart of making Kouchibouguac provide a mirror on divisions both within Acadian society and between Acadians and their québécois cousins.

Acadians and the ONF

9 The tensions that shaped the making of Kouchibouguac were closely related to the place of Acadians within the ONF. Until 1964, there was no autonomous French-language production unit within the film board. Once created, it was supposed to have functioned as a vehicle for francophone production across Canada. However, as Pierre Véronneau has put it, the unit was "dominée par les Québécois" who failed to distinguish between their own concerns and those of Acadians, who were going through a révolution tranquille acadienne. Accordingly, while the board produced a number of films in the late 1960s and early 1970s that dealt with Acadian topics, they were driven by "un regard québécois sur la réalité acadienne."9

10 This was most evident in the much-acclaimed L’Acadie l’Acadie?!? (1971) by the québécois filmmakers Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault. While the film dealt with an Acadian crisis, focusing upon the student protest movement at the Université de Moncton in the late 1960s, it did so through the lens of outsiders who translated this conflict, one of the first murmurs of a specifically Acadian awakening, into part of a larger linguistic struggle with its centre in Quebec. This approach served to make the film more relevant to Quebecers, clearly the target audience given the occasional use of subtitles to make the Acadians’ French understandable. The Quebec orientation was also evident as the particular students who provided the focus for the film were always being asked to explain their own concerns about Acadie in the context of Quebec developments of the moment. As Véronneau has explained more broadly, filmmakers such as Brault and Perrrault saw Acadian nationalist sentiment only as "un écho de leur propre [québécois] nationalisme et saisissent mal la spécificité de la situation et des revendications acadiennes."10

11 Among those Acadians who resented this québécois imperialism was the filmmaker Léonard Forest. Born in New England of Acadian parents, Forest came to Moncton as a teenager in the late 1940s and soon embarked on a career marked by a commitment to telling the stories of poor communities, particularly Acadian ones, trying to cope with their economic and social difficulties. In this context, he was a key player when the NFB/ONF created a program in the late 1960s, Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, to give "une voix aux secteurs défavorisés de la population."11 Forest made films about Acadians that were designed to show hope for poor people, and he had little patience with his québécois contemporaries and their brooding about the imminent destruction of their own society.12

12 Following the release of L’Acadie l’Acadie?!?, Forest went public with his concerns in an open letter to Pierre Perrault in which he rejected ideas imported from Quebec as "branchés sur la haine des autres." Instead, he imagined a new Acadie that was "ouverte au monde mais fermée pudiquement aux historiens de la mort." This last reference was to the negative attitudes that came from Quebec, and so Forest told Perrault: "L’Acadie n’a pas besoin de fossoyeurs."13 As Jeanne Deslandes has put it, Forest felt that Acadians needed their "own solutions to using film in service to the citizens – not those developed in Quebec."14

13 Driven by this commitment, Forest emerged as a champion of an autonomous Acadian production unit within the film board, but this was no easy matter as he had to confront the strong sense in Montreal that "national" (read québécois) norms needed to be defended within the hard-won French production unit. During the early 1970s, when Forest would have been fighting these battles, French-speakers in Quebec were involved in a process that saw their identity morphing from one that encompassed all French-speakers in Canada to one with a very strong territorial element that marginalized minority language groups such as the Acadians. In this context, René Lévesque referred to French-speakers outside Quebec as "dead ducks," whose future was doomed and whose plight should not influence the need to defend French Canadian interests in Quebec – the only territory where French-speakers constituted a majority.

14 This view of québécois distinctiveness was not shared by Ottawa. And this was particularly true after the 1968 election of the Trudeau government, which wanted to support the French-speaking minorities as a counterweight to growing support for sovereignty in Quebec. As it turned out, the NFB had already been engaged, going back to the Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle initiative, in moving away from "the universalizing pan-Canadianism of earlier NFB films." As a result, the NFB opened a number of English-language regional production centres – including one in Halifax – in the early 1970s.15 In this context, regionalization spread to the ONF with the opening in 1974 of three French-language production centres outside Montreal, one of which – established in Moncton – was quickly viewed by some Acadians as an opportunity to assert their own identity independently of the Québécois (who had often been so dismissive of Acadian concerns).

15 One Acadian filmmaker, for instance, saw the opening of the Moncton production centre as an opportunity to escape "les effets néfastes de l’impérialisme culturel centralisateur de la ville de Montréal."16 For their part, the Montreal filmmakers saw an attack on their québécois identity through the channeling of money away from the professionals in Montreal to the amateurs in places such as Winnipeg and Moncton. Jacques Godbout was particularly outspoken in this regard, fearing that funds would have to be provided to establish "des classes maternelles" for filmmakers outside Quebec. He argued "la régionalisation n’encourage pas, maintenant que nous en avons fait l’expérience, la qualité. Le label ONF s’y dévalue."17 Another Montreal filmmaker was equally blunt, arguing "il y a trop de talents au Québec qui crèvent de faim pour donner de l’argent aux Acadiens, aux Franco-Ontariens ou aux Franco-Manitobains."18 To be sure, there were also tensions between the centre and the periphery on the English side of the film board. However, those who ran the NFB did not have the same sense of mission of defending a nation within a nation that was held by Godbout and his colleagues. The Kouchibouguac project was born into this hostile environment within the ONF.

Making Kouchibouguac

16 As part of the efforts at the ONF head office to exercise control over productions in the hinterland, the Québécois-dominated Comité du programme met regularly in Montreal to rule on the fate of all French-language projects.19 The comité retained direct control over those projects worthy of being sufficiently financed to create a film that might be deemed "professionnel." Other regional productions might be watched over exclusively by staff in places such as Moncton, but these films would be allocated only meagre resources and were referred to patronizingly in the ONF lexicon of the 1970s as "artisanal." Not surprisingly, this ranking system – defined entirely at the Montreal headquarters – angered the filmmakers in the regions. At the very least, the Acadian production centre demanded that it have a seat on the Comité du programme. When this was rejected out of hand, the filmmakers in Moncton responded: "Ou bien, nous sommes des citoyens à part entière, ou bien nous ne le sommes pas. . . . Nous voulons être chez nous, chez nous, autant dans le cinéma qu’ailleurs."20

17 Although the ONF tried to draw sharp distinctions between regional and national productions, those lines were blurred in the case of Kouchibouguac and this engendered tensions from beginning to end while highlighting, according to Pierre Véronneau, "les vicissitudes d’un projet régional quand il doit emprunter cette filière [nationale]."21 The idea for the film first surfaced in 1975 thanks to Paul-Eugène LeBlanc, the founding head of the Moncton production centre. Before that, however, LeBlanc had been involved with the Conseil régional d’aménagement du Sud-Est (C.R.A.S.E.), which provided significant support for those expropriated from Kouchibouguac by helping to secure greater compensation for their lands and fishing rights.22 With this background, it is not surprising that LeBlanc would have proposed that the recently opened Acadian office develop a project around this story that resonated with a people whose history had been marked by the legacy of dispossession.

18 In spite of the film’s regional beginnings, the ONF recognized a dramatic story when it saw one. It made this a project "d’envergure nationale" so that significant funds were provided along with the need for Montreal approval every step of the way. While LeBlanc’s name shows up on official documents connected with the production’s early stages, the de facto producer was the Montreal-based Roger Frappier, who was then at the start of what would be a distinguished career as producer of such films as Denys Arcand’s Le déclin de l’empire américain and Jésus de Montréal.23 Frappier was no doubt drawn to the Kouchibouguac story by his involvement in the early 1970s in a number of film projects that tackled issues about class inequalities in Quebec, in particular the 1974 On a raison de se révolter "qui véhicule et synthétise la pensée marxiste-léniniste au Québec."24

19 To move the project forward, Frappier sought out Guy Borremans to develop the scenario and direct the film.25 Borremans, a Belgian-born photographer and filmmaker of some note, was living at the time in Acadie where he was teaching at the Université de Moncton. He was attracted to the project when provided with the transcript of a 1973 trial in which Jackie Vautour was tried and found guilty for his role in barricading the park. As Borremans explained to me, he immediately saw a parallel between the film that he hoped to make about Kouchibouguac and Robert Bresson’s 1962 film, Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc, in which trial transcripts provided the basis for highlighting the courageous struggle of an individual who would not sacrifice her beliefs. Of course, it was a leap to equate Vautour’s struggle about a piece of land with Joan of Arc’s fatal defiance. Nevertheless it is apparent that Borremans was buying into the emerging depiction of Vautour as an Acadian folk hero, a liberation figure along the lines of a Louis Riel or a Che Guevara.

20 Borremans’s vision for the film, which shaped the debate over its production within the ONF, was first put down on paper and presented to the Comité du programme in May 1975. He authored this proposal in collaboration with Gérald Leblanc, who had been working on the project since early in the year and would retain a connection throughout the production. Leblanc would go on to a career as one of Acadie’s most important poets and as the lyricist for the Acadian band 1755, whose song Kouchibouguac is featured in the film.26 In writing a memoir years later, Leblanc reflected on how "these Acadians’ ancestors had already lived through the Deportation of 1755 and were now going through something else not unlike that experience. I sorted through the documents and testimonies. I met with some of the people who had been expropriated, in order to familiarize myself with the facts of the crime."27

21 But if Gérald Leblanc was concerned about the "facts," Borremans’ intent was to produce what he described from the start as a work of "fiction" in which there would be re-enactments of "situations historiques," such as Vautour’s trial, that used both "les gens du Parc et des comédiens."28 The director even considered having Vautour, who Borremans described as "l’héro du film," play himself, which would have further linked Kouchibouguac with Bresson’s Le procès as both would have used amateur actors in order to make the film seem more realistic.29

22 Vautour was supposed to represent all of the expropriated, who were themselves representative of the larger Acadian population. There was no mistaking the Acadian nationalist tone in this initial scenario, which viewed the creation of the park "comme une aggression contre tout un peuple. . . . Reste à savoir quel rôle le Parc va jouer dans l’histoire acadienne. Destruction progressive d’un peuple, devenu tribu historique." However, if this were an advocacy film for Acadian rights it also had a class dimension, as the scenario highlighted the fact "l’élite acadienne ne s’est jamais montrée solidaire dans la lutte des citoyens du Parc. . . . Son silence demeure pour le moins inquiétant, si nous considérons les démarches que l’élite a réalisées pour valoriser le bilinguisme à l’Hôtel de Ville de Moncton, par exemple."30 While the Acadian elite was working within the system in support of bilingualism, it was not prepared to countenance the efforts of Vautour and his supporters who were working from outside.

23 When the Comité du programme first reviewed the project in May 1975, it raised questions about both the substance of the film and the qualifications of the Acadians who were behind it. In spite of Borremans’s explicit reference to the project as one of "fiction," the comité believed that it was dealing with a "documentaire" and expressed concerns about "la démarche cinématographique que ses auteurs envisagent et plus particulièrement sur le rôle qui sera accordé à la fiction dans le produit final." The comité also had reservations about the ability of the Acadian team to carry out the project, with some members wishing that responsibility had been given for "la réalisation d’une production régionale à une cinéaste de Montréal." Here lay the fundamental tension in the production of Kouchibouguac, a regional project that needed approval from Montreal. For the moment, however, the concerns of the comité were put aside and pre-production was allowed to continue with "les gens du milieu" playing a leading role; the hope was "les Acadiens tireront un grand bénéfice de la réalisation du projet dans leur région, car il leur fournira une excellente occasion d’acquérir une formation professionnelle."31

24 A dialogue of the deaf continued for nearly two years. On the one hand, there was Borremans, who in various versions of the scenario submitted during 1976 still wanted to "mêler style documentaire et fiction. Certaines des séquences seront de véritables interviews, d’autres seront simplement reconstituées" in order to tell the story "de l’impuissance d’un peuple deux fois déporté."32 On the other hand, there was the Comité du programme, most of whose members felt that there were "encore trop d’imprécisions majeures quant au contenu réel du film." The unhappy members wondered how it would be possible to recreate the trial "avec les amateurs et l’argent dont on dispose."33

25 In a sense, this futile conversation reflected the larger one taking place within the ONF between the producers outside Quebec and their masters in Montreal. In June 1976, at the same time that Borremans and the Comité du programme were talking past each other about yet another scenario, there were a series of meetings between the regional producers and the same committee. While Paul-Eugène LeBlanc argued for regional production in order to help avoid assimilation "par les Anglais, les Québécois ou Radio-Canada," the head of the comité, Clément Perron, referred to "la Régionalisation hors Québec" as something that had been "née presque malgré nous" and which could result in little of value from individuals who acted like "l’adolescent frustré qui arrive mal à dissimuler, sous ses gestes brusques et ses verres teintés, le désarroi de son âge."34

26 By the start of 1977, patience for the project in Montreal had entirely evaporated. Roger Frappier asserted his authority and wrote to Borremans that he had "pris ce projet au point mort . . . pour essayer de trouver des solutions valables à sa production. Je n’ai pas réussi." And so Frappier told the director: "Je ne peux pas mettre Kouchibouguac en production. Les raisons qui motivent cette décision sont multiples. . . . Mentionnons seulement la non-disponibilité de fonds, le vieillissement de la situation actuelle par rapport au scénario, la tension entre les diverses personnes au niveau du travail sur ce film en région, la piètre qualité du matériel de Jackie Vautour, déjà tourné."35

27 The project might well have ended there had it not been for a dramatic change in the Kouchibouguac saga that trumped Frappier’s view that the story had become stale, focused as it was on Vautour’s role in barricading the park in 1973. In the years that had followed, while the other residents made their way to their new homes, Vautour had held fast until his own home was bulldozed in November 1976. He was subsequently shuffled off to a motel, where he was still living in March 1977 when the police, acting on a complaint from the motel owner who had not been paid, decided to evict him. Vautour resisted this police action and was not removed before there had been significant destruction of property. By the time the dust settled, he and two of his sons had been arrested. Inspired by these events, Borremans wrote a new scenario – Kouchibouguac II – only two days after Vautour’s expulsion. As the director explained: "Devant ce pénible bilan, nous proposons l’abandon de l’approche dite de fiction-reconstitution afin de donner la parole aux faits immédiats. Dans les jours, les semaines qui vont suivre, il sera crucial d’enregistrer les témoignages de tous les acteurs d’un drame frisant le génocide."36

28 That Borremans had raised the rhetorical heat, now somehow equating the removal of the residents (or at least Vautour) with an act of genocide, did not seem to bother the members of the Comité du programme when they met shortly after the tabling of Kouchibouguac II. While there was still sufficient discussion to force the meeting to stretch over two days, in the end there was a palpable sense of relief that Borremans had abandoned the fictional aspects of the project and the green light was finally given for it to go into production – but only under circumstances designed to tighten Montreal’s control over the regions.37 By means of a process that Pierre Véronneau described as "un passe-passe comptable," funds that had been set aside for regional production were transferred – for the first time – for use by the head office. Frappier and his colleagues saw this as a positive step "vers le cinéma professionnel." As for the regions, they saw "un détournement des fonds."38

29 In the months that followed, Borremans moved the project into production – shooting interviews with the expropriés during April and May 1977 – while never entirely abandoning the idea of including staged elements. In this regard, the ONF entered into a contract with Antonine Maillet to have scenes from her play, Les Crasseux, filmed for inclusion in Kouchibouguac.39 Written in 1966, the play could not have been based upon the Kouchibouguac saga that had not yet begun; but it may as well have been since it focused on neighbouring Acadian towns – one well-to-do and the other poor – that were at odds with one another. The wealthier Acadians found their less-privileged cousins beneath contempt, and so thought of them as les crasseux (literally "covered in filth"). The elite ultimately discovered a pretext for having the government confiscate the lands of the weak, so that they would have to start again from scratch elsewhere. Maillet was playing on class divisions within Acadian society, in the process putting Acadian leaders in a position to expropriate and deport their own. Of course, in the Kouchibouguac affair, the individual who had actually signed the expropriation orders was the Acadian premier of New Brunswick; and the Kouchibouguac film project, from its earliest scenario, had included reference to the frequent disdain of well-to-do Acadians for the impoverished who were being removed.

30 Frappier apparently went along with Borremans in regard to Les Crasseux, but he was far less supportive when the director sought to create footage that would dramatize the destruction that had taken place in removing the residents. In one case, Borremans wanted to bulldoze an abandoned house and in another he wanted to recreate the burning of a bridge.40 In a sense this was Borremans returning to ideas about re-enactment that had found so little support from Montreal earlier in the process, and so it should come as little surprise that Frappier rejected such ideas out of hand.

31 Borremans viewed the producer’s behaviour as constituting "la grande censure," but Frappier saw a project that was coming off the rails and called all of the members of the production team to a meeting in early June 1977.41 The producer described "une situation de rupture, j’aimerais avant d’en arriver à l’irréparable, qu’on prenne au moins le temps de s’asseoir et de visionner l’ensemble des rushes tournés à ce jour."42 Borremans – along with other members of the production team – refused to meet Frappier unless someone "extérieur du projet" was also on hand.43 There was clearly little love lost between the director and his producer, and only a few days later Borremans quit, feeling that he had been manipulated and refusing "dorénavant toute forme collaboration avec cet organisme et ses représentants." Over 30 years later, Borremans still saw his treatment as having constituted part of "le livre noir de l’ONF."44

32 It is easy enough to attribute this situation, as Pierre Véronneau has, to "la personnalité du réalisateur," but there was also a larger context. On the same day that Borremans’s resignation was announced, the Comité du programme held a discussion about the very "pertinence de la Régionalisation."45 In this atmosphere of suspicion of regional projects, the Comité du programme indicated that its patience with Kouchibouguac had just about run out. Frappier proposed that the documentary could be salvaged by taking what had already been filmed, adding to it both existing newsreel footage as well as new footage that would be shot under the supervision of Gérald Leblanc, who had been involved with the project from the start, and Rhéal Drisdelle, a member of the team who had been an active supporter of the expropriés.46 After viewing the rushes, the comité was "étonné [par] l’enthousiasme de Frappier, à propos de ce matériel dénudé de toute cinématographie ou presque," and insisted that "un réalisateur de métier soit choisi pour terminer la réalisation du film Kouchibouguac."47

33 Despite the scepticism of the members of the Comité du programme, Frappier’s solution prevailed and provided the outlines for the path that took the film to completion. While the various tasks were parceled out among the existing crew members, no one was given complete directorial control, and Frappier was ordered to be "sur le lieux de tournage."48 If anyone had control over the final product it was Frappier, but this would not have been evident from the credits; they gave equal billing to 26 individuals listed alphabetically, including Borremans as well as others who had left the project before its completion.49 The credits also did not indicate the specific tasks of the crew members, but this appearance of collective responsibility was no act of solidarity within the crew that somehow mirrored the film’s own spirit of solidarity with those who had been expropriated. Frappier himself was under orders from Montreal to keep an eye on the crew, a number of whom were Acadians. As Pierre Véronneau has observed, for Acadians having to deal with the ONF, the Kouchibouguac project epitomized "l’arrogance de Montréal quand il traite avec eux."50

An Acadian film?

34 All of the scenarios prepared for Kouchibouguac suggested that this was a film that would emphasize the specific difficulties experienced by expropriés who were Acadian, a people with a particular experience of dispossession. Nevertheless, the film that was released early in 1979 never employed the words "Acadian" or "deportation," which is perhaps not that surprising given the neglect of Acadian concerns at the ONF. The 75-minute film consists almost entirely of the former residents telling their personal stories without reflecting on the larger "national" implications. By and large there is no narrator, so that the individuals are allowed to speak for themselves without the intrusion of another voice. These were the interviews that had largely been collected before Frappier took over, supplemented with new material such as a subsequent interview with Premier Richard Hatfield.

35 Kouchibouguac was, as one reviewer put it, "un film militant," and so can be seen in the context of the film board’s Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle program a decade earlier, which was driven by "the new theory of participant action research and community empowerment."51 At the same time, however, the film was not representative of the English-language films about Atlantic Canada produced by the NFB before 1990, which have been described as "exalt[ing] innocent lives of ‘honest toil’ threatened by the relentless yet necessary forces of modernism."52 There was nothing romantic about the depiction presented in Kouchibouguac, which instead shared some of Léonard Forest’s dramatization of the challenges for the survival of Acadian communities. However, while Forest and his peers had given control over some of the production process to the subjects of their films, Kouchibouguac – as we have seen – was scripted by outsiders to the communities under siege. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking that this was an advocacy film for the rights of the dispossessed, even if not one explicitly addressing Acadian issues, and so it shared many of the characteristics of the documentaries of the time that were broadly linked to the cinéma vérité movement whose practitioners viewed the "film maker as catalyst."53

36 Recognizing that Kouchibouguac was politically loaded, New Brunswick government officials who were contacted near the end of production refused to provide archival photographs of buildings that had been destroyed. Fredericton had been responsible for removing the people from the territory that would become a park and, in the process, had compiled files for each property that included photos. Sensitive about anything having to do with the Kouchibouguac story, the province refused to release the photos, even though it had a legal opinion that it could have done so. T.E. Sifton, a bureaucrat in the Department of Natural Resources who played a key role in the expropriation process, expressed concern about the feelings of the former residents who might be embarrassed if "the memory of what they used to live in will be held up for all to see. . . . I suspect the motives of the producers of this film and I believe that the residents do not want to be reminded of the past and the problems it brought with them."54

37 More likely, however, Fredericton was concerned about aiding the production of a film that would present the provincial government in a negative light. Indeed, the claim that the expropriés wanted to forget about the past was refuted by the last scene of Kouchibouguac, which showed storm clouds over the horizon as the following words appeared on the screen: "En mai 1978 577 expropriés de 213 familles signent une pétition réclamant des gouvernements de reprendre leurs terres et leurs droits." By this time, the Kouchibouguac saga had taken yet another new twist as Jackie Vautour, mindful that the formal transfer of the land from the province to the federal government was imminent, began to encourage former residents to return to the park to block this process. He returned to his own land in July 1978, and remains a squatter there over 30 years later.

38 Oddly, however, Vautour’s own role in Kouchibouguac is rather muted, and while he does occupy a significant amount of time in the film he was not portrayed as the larger-than-life hero that Borremans had imagined. As David Lonergan has put it, "Il y occupe une place importante, mais il n’est pas le pivot du documentaire."55 More specifically, Vautour’s growing status as an Acadian freedom fighter was played down, most notably in newsreel footage of his appearance at a Moncton courthouse to face charges connected with his expulsion from the motel. Protesters on hand to support Vautour were given a considerable amount of attention, but their placards referring to the Kouchibouguac cause are obscured while they can be clearly heard incongruously chanting "Français, Français, Français" in the background. Vautour’s cause had nothing to do with language, and so the only explanation for the crowd’s chanting was in connection with the earlier battles over bilingualism in Moncton. While this context would have only been understood by Acadians, the effect of the scene – for whomever would have been watching it – was to make the protesters appear less explicitly Acadian and more broadly French Canadian (much like the students in L’Acadie l’Acadie?!?).

39 The linguistic – as opposed to the Acadian – focus of the Kouchibouguac affair was further reinforced by the only two moments in the film when English was spoken. In one case, Roary Stewart, talking about his own expropriation and generally speaking in French, switches into English when describing his dealings with the government agent, who comes across as a swindler as he tells Stewart that he should not appeal the paltry offer presented for his land: "You might get as much as [the original offer], but you might get less." Summarizing this experience, Stewart angrily remarks: "C’est là qu’ j’aurai dû lui donner mon poing droit dans la gueule . . . . Un homme qui dit une affaire de-même là, c’est un vrai crook hein?"56

40 English-speakers also came off as untrustworthy in the interview with Richard Hatfield, the only person to appear on camera who had not been expropriated. Hatfield, of course, was not responsible for the Kouchibouguac affair, which he inherited from Louis Robichaud. Nevertheless, he was in power as programs were put in place to improve the settlements for the former residents, and he looks particularly uncomfortable in trying to justify his policies. On one such occasion, he is asked if "the expropriates really benefitted from the creation of the park." Shifting around in his chair and sweating visibly, Hatfield responded: "Well, I’m not, I don’t know that you can say that they have really benefitted. I’ve heard that many have claimed that they’ve had difficulty in socially adjusting. I’ve heard that a . . . a variety of claims but the . . . I would say that a number of them in fact. I think most of the jobs that were available in the park went to the former residents of the park." Hatfield comes across as shifty, which was probably not entirely fair given the considerable attention he paid to the individual cases of former residents with whom he had personal communications.57

41 In the midst of battles within the ONF about the value of regional French production, the Kouchibouguac project ended up under close supervision from Montreal with a story line that drew attention to linguistic conflict. As a result, the film seemed to speak to French Canadian oppression and not to anything that was specifically Acadian. Nevertheless, the film played in community halls and on local television stations almost exclusively to Acadian audiences, who would have recognized as their own both the story being told and the accents of those telling it. In the end, the film was never translated into English in spite of some discussion about making accessible a story about expropriation, which would have also reverberated in various parts of English Canada.58 This was a missed opportunity not only to bridge the linguistic divide, but also to bring French Canadians closer together. The film was never shown on television outside Acadie, this in spite of efforts to cast it in a manner that would have broadened its appeal, especially to a québécois audience. By and large, only Acadians saw Kouchibouguac; but within that audience there were some radically different reactions.

A mirror on Acadian society

42 Divisions among Acadians, as much as oppression at the hands of others, had been a part of the Kouchibouguac story from the start, and so it is hardly surprising that the film elicited widely differing responses from within the only audience to have seen it. By the time that Kouchibouguac was released, Acadians had been debating for some time whether to work within the system, following the lead of Louis Robichaud, or to stand in opposition to it, the position associated with Jackie Vautour. The film sympathized unambiguously with the latter view, and so on the day after its première the Acadian daily L’Évangéline provoked a public debate when it complained that the documentary amounted to little more than "la nostalgie" for a world (and a world of poverty at that) that was now gone. The reporter of the piece, Nelson Landry, complained that the film focused entirely on the negative and paid no serious attention to "le mode de vie actuel" of the expropriated, some of whom were now living in better housing than had previously been the case.59

43 The response to Landry’s critique was immediate and largely negative, reflecting the perspective of those who defended Vautour and who had been generally dissatisfied with L’Évangéline’s coverage since the start of the affair. While the newspaper did from time to time offer expressions of support for the expropriés, these were neither sufficiently frequent nor sufficiently strong for those, such as the editors of the student newspaper at the Université de Moncton, who accused L’Évangéline of keeping "‘les Acadiens dans leur ignorance’" in regard to Kouchibouguac. For these students, the newspaper was part of the "establishment" and so was reluctant to support the former residents, a perspective no doubt encouraged by the fact that L’Évangéline was receiving, at the time that the film was released, significant financial aid from the federal government – the very institution responsible for creating the park.60

44 Individuals who wrote responses to Landry’s commentary seized on the fact that it had been run by L’Évangéline as if it were a news story when it was in fact an editorial of sorts, a critique of those who had come to see Vautour and his supporters as Acadian freedom fighters. One letter to the editor complained about "un reportage subjectif," while another found the film "émouvant" for its depiction of the expropriés standing up for their rights: "Je n’ai encore jamais vu un Acadien défendre aussi héroïquement que Jackie Vautour, en dépit de l’incompréhension du plus grand nombre, la cause du droit à la propriété, et surtout, du droit à la justice pour ceux qui croient encore pouvoir se défendre sans autre preuve que celle du gros bon sens."61 Faced with significant public disapproval, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper offered to publish a retraction of Landry’s piece but it never appeared.62

45 Radically different perspectives on the film continued to be on display in the months that followed. On the one hand, there was the overwhelmingly positive response of the ordinary Acadians who came out to schools and community halls to watch Kouchibouguac as part of the same tour described at the start of this article. Fairly typical was the situation when it was screened in Saint John, a city with a relatively small French-speaking population, where 30 people – including some who hailed from the vicinity of the park – enthusiastically watched the documentary. Rhéal Drisdelle, the ONF representative who accompanied the tour, reported that those in attendance showed "beaucoup de sympathie pour les expropriés, ayant été eux-mêmes forcés de s’exiler à St-Jean pour des raisons économiques."63

46 The film also generated considerable enthusiasm at special screenings for such explicitly partisan events as the 1979 annual meeting of the "separatist" Parti acadien. On this occasion, Drisdelle observed "ce public politisé connaissait déjà les grandes lignes de ce drame." A screening of the film was also one of the major activities during a "Journée de solidarité pour les expropriés du Parc Kouchibouguac," which was held (illegally) on Jackie Vautour’s land within the park in September 1979. This event was organized by C.R.A.S.E., which, as was noted earlier, was an organization that had been defending the interests of the expropriés for roughly a decade and had included such principals in the film project as Paul-Eugène LeBlanc and Rhéal Drisdelle. Given this connection with both the cause of the expropriated and the film project, it was only natural that a long day of activities should have ended with an outdoor projection of "Kouchibouguac . . . sur un grand écran."64

47 In opposition to those who wanted to use the film to promote a cause, there were individuals in positions of authority who viewed the documentary as pure propaganda that concealed the benefits of the park to score political points. This perspective was communicated in the 1981 report of the Special Inquiry on Kouchibouguac National Park, which had been established in the late 1970s by the Canadian and New Brunswick governments to try to resolve some of the issues that had allowed the crisis to simmer for so long. Chaired by Gérard La Forest, a distinguished New Brunswick lawyer who would later serve on the Supreme Court of Canada, the inquiry recommended – among other matters – that Jackie Vautour be allowed to remain in the park, an action that made it possible for the story to recede slowly from public view.65

48 In spite of this effort to calm the waters, there was also bitter criticism in the report of those who resisted the expropriation and those who supported the resisters, and in this regard the ONF film was singled out for special attention. Echoing the view of L’Évangéline, the inquiry report depicted the film as one-sided for not showing the improved conditions of some who had been moved: "It is difficult to say that any particular event in the film is false, but the total impression is extremely misleading. The plight of the Park residents following the expropriation is rightly underlined. But life did not stop there. Much is made of the small amounts the expropriates received in compensation for their homes . . . . But nothing is said of the relocation program under which the expropriates were able to get far better houses than most of them had before. . . . We hear nothing of those – and they are numerous – who are now satisfied with their lot."66

49 Instead, La Forest complained that the public heard too much in the film about Vautour, and what it heard tended to be uncritically positive. For instance, there is a sequence that shows Vautour being greeted like a conquering hero when charges against him were dropped for having resisted eviction from a motel after his house had been destroyed. The report of the inquiry questioned the objectivity of the filmmakers in this regard, complaining that "the release of Vautour . . . looks like vindication by the court, rather than a release on a technicality based on a mishandling of the case by the police."67

50 As for why Vautour and the aggrieved expropriés more generally were treated so well in Kouchibouguac, La Forest speculated that it may have had something to do with the fact that "two former members of C.R.A.S.E., Paul-Eugène LeBlanc and Rhéal Drisdelle, were both employees of the National Film Board in Moncton when the film was produced." Hedging his bets, the commissioner observed: "It may well have been that these individuals had little to do with the film. We have no knowledge to the contrary." Having stepped back from his accusation, La Forest then concluded by suggesting the charge once again: "But certainly the story in the film faithfully mirrors the views of C.R.A.S.E. and Mr. Vautour throughout the piece."68

51 As we have seen, LeBlanc and Drisdelle were connected with the film, but the report of the Special Inquiry – apparently trying to calm the waters – was not prepared in a manner that forcefully accused them in its final published form. It was better to make it appear as if others were subjective. However, off the record, in notes made in conjunction with interviews conducted in preparation of the report, one of the lead figures for the inquiry made his views much clearer. Particularly telling were his notes from having viewed Kouchibouguac with Drisdelle on two occasions. On the first of these, he observed: "The film is very much like Drisdelle himself. . . . The concern for the expropriates is genuine but he does not mind twisting reality a bit to convince people." As for how the film distorted reality, this same individual provided a long list of Kouchibouguac’s failings following his second viewing of the film with Drisdelle: "The total impression [of the film] is very misleading. Not only does it neglect matters where the government properly responded, [but] it lets the expropriates do the talking. What they say is not false in terms of what they think or feel happened, but . . . this honest belief is not always consistent with the facts."69

52 Even more caustic were remarks recorded during an interview with one of the leading figures in Acadian society that was prepared for the inquiry in 1980. While the internal notes prepared for the inquiry refuted many of Drisdelle’s comments, there was no such refutation of the wild accusations made by this Acadian leader. While none of these claims made their way into the final report, they do shed some light on the divisions within Acadian society. Particularly striking was the claim that "L’ONF a donné beaucoup d’aide [aux militants]. Ils ont payé pour des manifestations; ils ont engagé des autos. . . . On s’est servi des fonds de l’ONF pour essayer d’élire [Père Armand] Plourde du Parti acadien."70

53 The anger generated by Kouchibouguac among some Acadian leaders was genuine, and reflected the fact that ordinary Acadians did watch the film and could often be mobilized by its depiction of the expropriations. At a time when many Acadians were questioning their own institutions, the film was no doubt viewed as threatening to those in authority – a perception confirmed by a high-ranking federal bureaucrat close to the Kouchibouguac dossier, who wrote to Premier Hatfield at the time that La Forest was working on his report: "Most of [Vautour’s] active supporters seem to come from more distant communities such as Shediac and Shippagan, where interests less informed on the particulars, have rallied to the cause. These interests have been strongly influenced by a film, highly sympathetic to Vautour, prepared for the NFB."71 It was convenient for this civil servant to conclude that only those "less informed" had been moved by the film, but the record indicates that a wide array of Acadians – regardless of where they lived – generally responded to it positively while those with some authority most often responded negatively. Few, however, were left indifferent.

54 From the Acadians who conceived the idea for the film, to the Québécois at the ONF who were sometimes troubled by it, to the Acadian audiences that saw it either in community halls or on television, Kouchibouguac generated strong reactions while along the way reflecting a number of larger realities. On one level, the film provides a window into the complicated relationship between the various components of French Canada in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution. Having achieved a sense of what was possible in Quebec, the Québécois in positions of power at the ONF showed little concern with telling someone else’s story, in much the same way that Quebec’s political masters at the time were unconcerned with the impact of their quest for greater autonomy upon the French-speaking minorities in the rest of Canada.

55 Kouchibouguac was a film that had, at least in terms of the words that were said and some of the scenes that were shown, been shorn of the Acadian edge that had been part of its raison d’être. Nevertheless, it was ordinary Acadians who saw the film, who heard their own accents telling the story, and who were brought together for the experience. Contrast this with the negative reactions of some Acadian leaders to Kouchibouguac, and we can see how the film also provides a window into the deep divisions within Acadie as it lived through its own révolution tranquille. Within the ONF this film was a small enterprise, but one which spoke to some much larger French Canadian issues.