Lesser Evil: Giving Family Archives New Life
In 2018, I contributed to directing and editing four Lesser Evil music videos produced by Cult Nation. With Ariane Bisson McLernon and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux, the project brought their musical world together with archives from my own family. It was a creation with a very personal place in my career.
These images existed long before the music videos. They already held faces, gestures and moments that moved me. Bringing them into a musical project opened another way of looking at them: music and editing could give them new momentum while preserving something of their origins.
My work was to contribute to this new storytelling with existing images. Editing archives means seeking relationships: a movement responding to a sound, a glance changing meaning when it meets another shot, a rhythm allowing emotion to emerge. The material keeps its memory, but also becomes cinematic material.
Caution, the first video shared before the launch, featured an intriguing car journey. The four music videos were to be presented at the launch of Lesser Evil’s first EP on November 29, 2018 at The Emerald bar in Montréal. It was a rewarding opportunity to bring the musical project together with the images that gave it this form.
I remain deeply grateful to my family for allowing me to use these archives. They moved me profoundly, and the project offered them a new space. It connected two dimensions of my life: memories that came before me and the creative work I’m building as an independent filmmaker.
Lesser Evil reminds me that we can tell stories without necessarily filming new images. Editing can reveal a story where we thought we were only preserving a memory. This project fed my interest in memory, rhythm and unexpected encounters between images and music.
Watch Caution:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ZO31uQPrg
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