Documentary
116 min
Langage : italian/creole/french/english
Quebec, Canada, 2008
Production : Bruno Baillargeon avec Les Vues du jardin

In the heart of a North American city, a cast of retired Haitian and Italian immigrants tend their gardens, planted on a vast vacant lot soon to be replaced by a highway.

The film takes place within this formerly agricultural wasteland, now dominated by high-voltage power lines, where each passing spring is witness to the rebirth of these gardens in exile. A lush, uniquely pastoral tableau emerges, while echoes of the omnipresent city resonate off camera. Against this backdrop, a double menace lurks: that of the impending disappearance of this green space, to be
replaced by asphalt, and that, more dramatic, of the disappearance of a generation of immigrants, born in the countryside but urbanized by fate, who have come here in search of their rural roots, reviving the ageold traditions of the land they left behind. Over the seasons of planting, harvesting and friendly conversation, the common theme that emerges is that of the land: the land where we are born, the land we leave, the land that welcomes or rejects us, the land we cultivate and that sustains us, and the land that others lay to waste…