Park-Ex portrait

>> Karina Goma’s Un coin du ciel takes a
humanistic look at the local immigrant experience

REASON FOR ACCOMODATION: Un coin du ciel

by MALCOLM FRASER

Any anglo Montrealer who’s dared venture north of Van Horne has no doubt remarked that Park-Extension is the city’s most vibrant, ethnically diverse neighbourhood, its population including a large number of recent immigrants. Local filmmaker Karina Goma provides a closer look at the neighbourhood’s patchwork of stories in her new documentary Un coin du ciel.

The narrative is framed by the local CLSC, where the neighbourhood residents go for help in filling out official paperwork, resisting the aggressive behaviour of ruthless and/or negligent landlords, or just to vent their frustrations to a sympathetic ear. Early on, one of the CLSC workers refers to the place as “a social emergency ward” and “the Home Depot of problems.” Both analogies seem apt as the workers, with saintly patience, listen to their clients’ travails, which range from the genuinely harrowing (a Pakistani woman describing rats crawling in her baby’s crib) to the hysterical (an elderly Eastern European woman raining biblical damnation on her landlord).

Through the film, we get to know these workers, including Tassia, a first-generation Québécoise of Greek origin who’s been at the CLSC for 29 years, as well as the clients—a Sri Lankan woman who gamely lets the filmmakers follow her through childbirth, an Armenian genocide survivor who’s just lost his wife of 70 years, a toothless, elderly Vietnamese beggar and others.

Politically, the film couldn’t come at a better time, with the Bouchard-Taylor Commission giving a public platform to cranky anti-immigration bigots; indeed, the producers symbolically donated a copy to the commission on its visit to Laval. The film should be required viewing for anyone with a bias against immigrants; its protagonists’ stories are alternately inspiring and heartbreaking, and their mixed feelings about their home countries illustrate the paradox of the immigrant experience on a clear, human level.

Cinematically, it’s very matter-of-fact; other than one striking image—the Armenian man being pushed in a wheelchair by his son through snowbank-lined streets—there’s not much in the way of stylistic flourishes. Goma’s camera is unobtrusive, striking just the right balance between Ken Burns stasis and shaky-camera hell. The point is the human drama unfolding in Park-Ex, and Goma captures it with an expert storyteller’s eye.

Un coin du ciel opens this
Friday, Dec. 7

>> Movie Listings