A decade after an unattended train derailed in Quebec's Eastern Townships, killing 47 people, director Philippe Falardeau revisits the event in the documentary, Lac-Mégantic – This Is Not an Accident, offering viewers a detailed post-mortem of the events leading to one of Canada’s worst rail disasters.Courtesy of Hot Docs
If pressed, many Quebeckers – really, anyone across the country – could recall just where they were and what they were doing on July 6, 2013, when news broke about a train derailment the night before in Lac-Mégantic. The accident, which killed 47 people instantly and displaced thousands of residents in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, lingers in the national memory as a scar, traumatic and permanent.
Yet for acclaimed Québécois filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, he can’t for the life of him recall what it was like to first learn of the devastation. At least not since he has devoted the past four years to making Lac-Mégantic – This Is Not an Accident, a new four-part docuseries that will have its North American premiere at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto this weekend.
“I’ve now completely forgotten where I was or what I was doing when I first heard of it, because I’ve since seen so many things, heard from so many people, been to the town so many times that it has completely erased what I retained from the event originally,” the director says today.
What Falardeau does remember, though, is bicycling with his daughter to her daycare in Montreal a few years later, and noticing that they passed a train track where tankers were parked. “I kept saying to myself that after Mégantic, surely the authorities have fixed the problems. But then I read Mégantic by Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny detailing the fallout, and realized, okay this is not safe at all, nothing has changed,” he says.
Which is how the Oscar-nominated director behind 2011′s Monsieur Lazhar came to make a sometimes furious, sometimes beautiful and always thoughtful documentary tracing exactly what led to the Lac-Mégantic disaster, and what can be done to ensure that something like it never happens again.
Unfolding in four hour-long chapters, Falardeau’s doc balances extraordinarily emotional moments – including interviews with family members of victims – with rigorous research into the various institutions and agencies that failed the residents of Lac-Mégantic. The miniseries is as much a testimony to the strength and resilience of a small town as it is a true-crime doc, rigorous and devastating.
Through interviews with the families of those who died, former and current town officials and the men held responsible, this riveting and carefully crafted four-part series details the shocking sequence of decisions that ultimately led to a spill of more than 7.7 million litres of crude oil, irreversibly changing the lives of everyone in town.Courtesy of Hot Docs
“I’ve never had the word ‘devastating’ associated with one of my films, but I feel that’s the right word,” Falardeau says. “I lose a lot of sleep when making feature films, but this is another brand of insomnia. When I make a fictional film, my characters don’t call me in the middle of the night.”
One of Quebec’s most acclaimed narrative filmmakers to find success in both Canada and Hollywood – often spoken of in the same breath as Denis Villeneuve and the now late Jean-Marc Vallée – Falardeau got his start in docs before making such features as The Good Lie (starring Reese Witherspoon), Chuck (Liev Schreiber) and My Salinger Year (Sigourney Weaver).
“I did a doc for the National Film Board in 1996, but it was more a playful, experimental thing. Then I wanted to make a doc on my roommate who was out of a job at the time, but then he found one, so that story ended up being my first feature, and I never looked back,” Falardeau recalls of the 2000 comedy La Moitié gauche du frigo (The Left-Hand Side of the Fridge). “But this project presented itself when I just became so angry about the lack of rail safety in this country.”
While there was a temptation to fictionalize the proceedings – as writer Sylvain Guy and director Alexis Durand-Brault do with their new eight-episode series Mégantic, which premiered on Quebec streamer Club Illico this past February – Falardeau wanted to explore the story through the voices of real people.
“But I’m not a journalist,” he says, “so it was new for me to reach out to these people.”
Enlisting seasoned doc producer Nancy Guerin as his co-writer, Falardeau managed to get dozens of people to sit down in front of a camera, including Edward Burkhardt, the former chief executive of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, which owned the derailed train. (Denis Lebel, who was Minister of Transport at the time of the accident, did not participate.) Each interview is shot in the anamorphic widescreen format of 2.39:1, while the film’s structure eschews a narrator, both decisions giving the project a distinctly cinematic feel.
“I kept talking about the series during shooting as ‘the film’ because that’s the only thing that I know,” Falardeau says. “I tried to build a narrative arc that would be valid inside each episode as well as the series as a whole.”
While the project arrives near the 10th anniversary of the derailment, the timing was unintentional, as Falardeau had to deal with pandemic-related delays. But the filmmaker is also careful around the question of whether any production putting Lac-Mégantic in the spotlight could be considered “too soon.”
“If it was six or seven years, it might have been too soon, but today I feel that the people there were ready to talk and offer a piece of their life story,” the director says. “It can be part of the healing process.”
Lac-Mégantic – This Is Not an Accident screens at Hot Docs on April 29 (hotdocs.ca). It premieres May 2 on Videotron’s French-language video-on-demand Vrai service, with other broadcast announcements to follow.