“It’s the most difficult movie I’ve done in my life. Acadian director Renée Blanchar does not hide it: immersing herself in the scandals of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests on young boys has completely shaken her. But it was necessary, she said, to tell this truth and help the survivors to break the silence.
In his documentary The silence, which premiered in several theaters in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Quebec on Friday, Renée Blanchar focuses on an important chapter in the recent history of New Brunswick and which is echoed around the world. The issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been in the news for several years at the rate of investigations and legal proceedings.
In New Brunswick, it was from 2011 that complaints began to increase in small French-speaking villages. From the 1950s to the 1980s, several priests there sexually abused hundreds of young boys.
Renée Blanchar is particularly interested in the case of the priest Camille Léger. At that time, the man – who died in 1990 – was very well off, respected and had a lot of influence in the community of Cap-Pelé. He supervised altar boys and scouts, whom he mistreated and sexually abused in the utmost silence.
The director gives the floor to several survivors. In front of the camera, they dive back into their memories, their throats tight, tears in their eyes. They tell of the shame and loneliness in which they have locked themselves all these years, not daring to tell anyone. They also bear witness to the devastation that these abuses and assaults have had on their personal development.
“I was just an 11-12 year old kid. My trust in people of authority has been quite broken [après ça] »Says Bobby Vautour, explaining that he left school early and never managed to keep a job for very long.
“It has given me problems my whole life. I have never been able to hug my better half or my children. […] I never liked who I was, who I am. I no longer recognize myself, ”testifies Lowell Mallais, a survivor of Father Lévi Noël.
A priest of Bathurst at the time, the latter subjected many children to the same hell. Accused in 2010, the latter was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed down to a Catholic priest in Canada.
“This documentary is eloquent proof of the institutionalization of silence within the Catholic Church,” says Renée Blanchar. Because the Church was aware, it even moved Father Lévi Noël from parish to parish from 1958 to 1981, without ever cracking down, according to the director’s research.
A difficult subject
Renée Blanchar recognizes that the subject of her documentary can be disturbing. She herself was “shaken” by these stories when they became public, around 2011. If she had the idea to quickly dig into the subject by giving voice to the victims, it took her several years to realize his documentary.
“It’s so hard to tackle,” she says. I thought I was ready, but you never really are when you dive into this type of subject. It must be said that the subject very quickly became personal, forcing the director to question herself.
“I discovered that a priest whom I worked with and to whom I gave the floor in my first film, Vocation household, was also a child abuser, she explains. It really shook me. […] It lived in me several years before I really embarked on this documentary. We had to talk about these stories and I felt that I had that responsibility. “
With The silence, She thus wishes to “give the keys” to better understand the silence surrounding this sexual abuse. “I think I was a transmission belt of a truth that we did not understand, that we did not talk about, but that we had to say. This is what gave me the courage to go all the way. That, and for giving these men a voice to help them break the silence. “
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