Pea Soup is an ethnographic video on the Quebecois tribe. It's a collage and a jig-saw puzzle in which sounds and images box themselves one inside the other, rendering a portrait of a people. Photos, texts and scenes of diverse places constitute the material of this fragmented and virulent criticism of Quebec's social and cultural differences. In the end, it is a document on "Pea Soups" the world over.
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Documentation
"In 1972, when you began shooting Pea Soup, did you feel you were taking on a big job? First of all, it was your first feature-length film...
I remember telling myself at the time that it was the work of my life! The day after the NFB refused us a 16mm camera, we changed course and began shooting in Westmount with a video camera. The film took several years to shoot, you know; it came out in 1978. Sometimes, for several long weeks at a time, we wondered what to shoot and found our ideas in current events. Or we said to ourselves: "We have to go film in factories"; so we looked in the phone book. We found our boot factory on Ontario Street, right nearby. We introduced ourselves as students from some university with a research assignment on footwear. And we got permission to shoot there for a whole week."
LA FRANCE, Mireille. Pierre Falardeau Persiste et filme, Montreal, Éditions de l'Hexagone, 1999. [http://www.pierrefalardeau.com/content/view/35/1/] (6 October 2009)
