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Subjects (65)
Religion, Beliefs and Ethics (39)

Priests and Priesthood (3)

  • Eye Witness No. 65
    Eye Witness No. 65
    Hector Lemieux  &  Ronald Weyman 1954 11 min
    Old Glory Weather Station: Life on top of the world is a year-round experience for meteorologists who work at the highest observatory in the Canadian Rockieson on Old Glory Mountain in British Columbia. Easter in Jerusalem: Roman Catholic priests from many Canadian communities join in a pilgrimage to the Holy City during Easter week.
  • I, Barnabé
    I, Barnabé
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    Jean-François Lévesque 2020 15 min
    I, Barnabé takes a luminous look at a desperate man’s existential crisis. During a night of stormy drunkenness, he receives a visit from a mysterious bird and is forced to reconsider his life.
  • The Silence
    The Silence
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    Renée Blanchar 2021 1 h 48 min
    WARNING: This film discusses the topic of childhood sexual assault. Viewer discretion is advised.

    Why be silent about the most serious matters? Doesn’t silence perpetuate suffering? From the 1950s to the 1980s, Catholic priests sexually abused many young boys in the francophone towns of New Brunswick. These scandals only came to light when the victims were in their fifties, provoking shock and outrage in the media and the public. Why did the affected communities keep silent so long, preferring secrecy to justice and truth? Profiting from their positions of influence to impose a “pious silence” on their parishioners, authority figures built an abusive system that tells us as much about the type of oppression specific to the Acadian population as it does about the blanket denials issued by the Catholic Church. Called to confront the power of this collective silence, veteran filmmaker Renée Blanchar meets with survivors in an attempt to untangle the deeply rooted reasons for this secrecy. With The Silence, she takes us as close as she can to the humanity of these broken men, revealing the forces that, today as in the past, have the power to unite or divide Acadian communities.

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