Gimme shelter
>> The doc Squat! looks back at last summer’s
housing brouhaha

by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

Most Montrealers will remember the media buzz surrounding the temporarily successful squatting initiative of summer 2001. Now local filmmaker Ève Lamont’s electrifying video documentary, produced with the full cooperation of the squatters, is screening at Ex-Centris. It is crucial viewing for anyone concerned with the current housing crisis in Montreal or interested in the larger squatting movement.
Lamont’s documentary (she is the writer, director and camerawoman) is unapologetically partisan and, in this sense, goes some distance towards balancing the media score. The incessantly negative mainstream media coverage of the squatters is a recurring issue in Squat!.

More importantly, Lamont is exceptionally skillful at contextualizing the incident, and integrating the larger issues with the day-to-day events as they unfolded. Then-mayor Pierre Bourque’s offer to move those who occupied the last remaining building on Overdale (site of another housing standoff in ’88) in July to the Préfontaine building on Rachel is presented in light of his mayoral campaign. Criticism by then-candidate Gérald Tremblay—and Bourque’s subsequent backtracking—appear entirely tied to their competition for the mayoralty, and not at all to a concern with the appalling lack of low-cost housing in Montreal, the insidious creep of gentrification and the growing number of homeless people in a city filled with vacant buildings.

The real triumph of Squat!, however, is the thoughtful representation of the squatters themselves. Approximately 10 of the 50 or so members of the Préfontaine collective are interviewed in depth, and followed throughout the two months: the interviewees range from a 16-year-old single mother to a 48-year-old father of three in a minimum-wage job who can’t afford to pay rent. As a group, they are shown operating in the best possible faith, working as a collective to renovate the building, to negotiate with authorities and to establish a “code de vie” for themselves. :

Squat! opens Friday, Sept. 27 at Ex-Centris. Free public screening tonight, Thursday, Sept. 26, 7:30pm, at Notre-Dame viaduct (corner Amherst and Viger)

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