Cavale au Canada

Directed by Michael Blum

Montreal, 2013. Dina Mendes, artist and the daughter French criminal superstar Jacques Mesrine had from an affair in 1970, returns to Montreal and looks for her father's traces. She embarks on this search with both personal quest and artistic project in mind. The film shifts from fiction conventions to cinema-vérité, particularly in Percé, where the project reaches its momentum. In the end, Dina Mendes ends up achieving neither the personal quest nor a meaningful artistic project, caught between over-exposed facts and an impossible identification. Nonetheless, what this odd film - in which you will never see or hear Mesrine once - does achieve is to provide a Québec perspective onto a history that is so central to French popular culture.