The jealousy of Aline, a girl, with regard to her father's friend.

Aline

-"Vues de l'Est" meets children from the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood in Montreal (Canada), the neighbourhood where the director was born and which has become synonymous with poverty, violence and school dropout. The film gives voice to children who are said to have little chance of escaping their condition, children who are going through those crucial years when we build our self-image and project ourselves into the future. The children of "Vues de l'Est" are filmed where they live, we get attached to their neighbourhood, their families, their fears. They become reporters themselves and capture on film objects, places, people that are meaningful to them: a picture of a father we have never known, a place where we like to think, a homeless man with a tattered heart. Beyond fear and doubt, the film bears witness to the light that lives in the children of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood, to the strength and beauty of these lives that resemble all the others. Lives full of dreams of tomorrow that sing.

Vues de l'Est

East End Kids, in 2003, set out to meet children in the Montreal neighborhood where the filmmaker grew up, whose name calls up images of poverty and social problems. In East End Forever they are turning 18: we meet each of them again, take the measure of what has happened in their lives since 2003 and follow them as they approach adulthood. How will they face their future? Will they still be full of dreams and resilience? Are their East End roots going to be a handicap or a source of strength?

L'Est pour toujours

Carole Laganière dives deeply into personal territory in this beautifully crafted exploration of absence and loss and its painful effect on daily lives. Inspired by her mother’s steadily advancing Alzheimer’s and the inevitability of her estrangement, Laganière weaves their story with the stories of others wrestling with loss: Ines, an immigrant who returns to her birth country of Croatia to find the mother who abandoned her during the war; Deni, an American author who’s finally able to search for his Quebec roots; and Nathalie, who’s desperately looking for her missing sister. Through their experiences the film ponders how absence is often the catalyst for a quest—a quest for information, understanding and often acceptance. Through its many voices, Absences speaks to us of the immense fragility and resiliency of human emotions.