Come and celebrate the 370th anniversary Jeanne Mance’s arrival in New France.
La Folle entreprise, sur les pas de Jeanne Mance (2010) is the first-ever full-length film about Jeanne Mance, and earned its director the Médaille de la Société historique 2010.
Fascinated by the life story of Jeanne Mance (1606–1673) and her role as cofounder of Montréal, documentary filmmaker Annabel Loyola examines the motives that led a seventeenth-century woman — who was not married, a widow or a nun — to head off into the great unknown to spend the rest of her life in a hostile environment.
The filmmaker will talk about the film, followed by an open discussion.
Film Synopsis
A woman from our time examines the life of a woman from the past: Jeanne Mance (1606–1673), cofounder of Montréal.
Annabel Loyola was born in Langres, a small ancient city in France’s southern Champagne region — the same city in which Jeanne Mance had been born some four centuries earlier. Langres-Paris-Montréal: this is their shared itinerary.
In her adopted city, Loyola learned that Jeanne Mance not only co-founded the small fortified town and its first hospital, but also saw the city grow from a handful of inhabitants to become the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, and the largest French-speaking city in North America.
Some called the project “crazy”. But what a project it was: creation of a humanitarian society, independent of royal and religious authority, encouraging people to help and care for one another — a society without social inequality; the utopia most of us still dream of.
Archival images, engravings, seventeenth-century paintings, manuscripts and antiquarian books share space with baroque music and sound effects from the time, blended with a modern soundtrack. Building a bridge between past and present, the film encourages reflection and contemplation.