If someone mentions race riots and student protests in the 1960s and 70s, chances are that would mean, to most people, civil rights protests in the American south, sit-ins in California or the National Guard opening fire on students at Kent State University in Ohio. But revolution and resistance were ideas that crossed borders and seeded outbreaks all over the world, and supposedly friendly, polite countries such as Canada had no special immunity. This elegantly crafted documentary, directed by Michèle Stephenson, recounts a charged moment in Quebec history in 1969 when black students at Sir George Williams University, now called Concordia University, staged what would become the biggest campus protest in Canadian history; it resulted in scores of arrests and about C$2m in property damage due to fire destroying a computer lab.
Interviews with several of the protest’s key leaders – including Norman Cook, Brenda Dash and Rosie Douglas – are stitched together with extensive archive material, all of which, including the interviews, were shot in black and white. The older material has the very fine grain and fragile silvery sheen characteristic of the superb 16mm film stock of the time; it goes brilliantly with the soundtrack of deliberately discordant jazz and vintage gospel tunes for which a shoutout is due to composer Andy Milne and music supervisors Sarah Maniquis-Garrisi and Michael Perlmutter, who between them create a soundscape as bewitching as the visuals.
True North describes a story that doesn’t just start with the complaint by the West Indian students against a flagrantly racist biology professor named Perry Anderson, but goes back, as it must, to colonialism and slavery. More recently, there was the wanton destruction of Africville in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a black community next to the city dump with a vibrant history that was razed to the ground in the name of “urban renewal”. Added to which was the inspiration from black Americans’ protests across the border in the US, and a million local quotidian racist slights and insults, all of which came to a boil on that campus.
At least, there’s some justice in learning that several of the protesters were themselves annealed in that conflagration, learning enough realpolitik to go on, despite deportations and prison terms, to become politicians and community leaders later on.
• True North is at Bertha DocHouse, London, 22-28 May.
