A Voice remains

Outline

A Voice Remains is a poetic reflection on memory and on the collecting of folk history, as seen through the eyes and journey of Francine Brunel-Reeves. As she attempts to retrace the history of “The White Doe” — a song of endless fascination for her that has been transmitted orally from culture to culture, from one ocean to the next for over a thousand years — she also retraces her own life, her own history.

Synopsis

Francine Brunel-Reeves is an exception to our ephemeral times, our fleeting trends and ever-changing lifestyles. Hers is an uphill battle. She has devoted many years of her life to uncovering the history behind a centuries-old song known as “The White Doe”; a song that has been passed on entirely through oral tradition for over a thousand years, from one culture and continent to the next. We follow alongside Francine as she traces a long and abundant journey. In Charlevoix, she meets with people she recorded over the years, people whose stories and songs she collected. In France, she revisits her own musical past. In her Montréal home, she invites us into a more personal, private universe. As time passes, Francine begins to feel an urgent need to pass on her own “treasures”, her own wealth of knowledge. Using a variety of mediums and audiovisual sources, A Voice Remains reflects upon the fragility of memory and the immeasurable value of collecting stories and history.

Director's biofilmography

After completing his studies in cinema and anthropology in 2001, Jean-Nicolas Orhon created Filmenbulle, a production company. Among his achievements, Orhon directedAsteur in 2003, about the survival of the French language in Louisiana. In 2006, Orhon co-produced Sébastien Patenaude’s Tiens ferme, a shock documentary about dealing with life after a failed suicide. In 2007, he directed the short documentary Comptine, followed by Tu t’souviens-tu? in 2008. That same year, he completed the medium length documentary A Voice Remains, produced by Camera Oscura Films. Using cinema as a tool for memory and the indexing of time, Jean Nicolas Orhon freely moves between fiction and documentary. He is currently writing a short fiction film titled Carrés jaunes sur fond vert about the secrets of artwork. He is also developing another documentary project that deals with the global phenomenon of the shantytown as a place of urban gestation, a place that carries with it the memories and past of an entire community.