Ru's box-office success shows how the public is reconnecting with Quebec cinema

Caroline Bacon was struggling to find her words, as she and a crowd slowly shuffled out of Montreal's Cinéma Beaubien after watching the made-in-Quebec film Ru.

"It's very touching, deeply moving even," she said with a hand on her chest, choking back her emotions. "I have no words but to say it was very beautiful and I recommend it to everyone."

Based on the book of the same name by writer Kim Thúy, the movie tells the story of Tihn, a young girl who immigrates to Quebec from Vietnam in 1978 along with her family and other refugees known as "boat people." Tihn's character and the story are inspired by Thúy's life.

Since its release on Nov. 24, the film has made over $1.5 million at the box office, becoming the sixth Quebec-made movie to pass the million-dollar mark in the last year. The last time that happened was in 2011, according to distributor Immina Films.

Director Charles-Olivier Michaud says he's just happy — albeit surprised — to see people watching the movie in theatres. 

"The way it was shot, the way it's framed ... the performances are very subtle. It's very intimate, so it feels best in a movie theatre," he said. 

At Cinéma Beaubien, Ru is getting higher attendance than more recent movies and will likely be screened for the entire month of January, says the cinema's director of programming, Jean-François Lamarche. 

"There's a craze for Quebec cinema at the moment that I've rarely seen," he said. "Ru is part of that excitement."

Jade Fraser, the outreach communication director at Post-Moderne and Cinéma Moderne, suspects the strikes in Hollywood might have created more space for Quebec movies to thrive. 

"Also the diversity of Quebec cinema this year is really quite something," she said. "There's a film for everyone to discover."

Other Quebec titles that enjoyed box-office success in 2023 range from comedies to dramas: Simple comme Sylvain, Les hommes de ma mère, Le temps d'un été, Testament and Katak: Le brave béluga.

Years in the making

Michaud first sat down with Thúy to discuss the adaptation of her book in December 2017 over a coffee at her house. By that point she was already friends with one of the film's producers, André Dupuy, whom she had met at her Montreal restaurant, Ru de Nam, in 2004.

Michaud remembers visualizing a movie while he was reading Ru when it first came out in 2009.

"She's like a street photographer," he said. "The book is like a photo book because there's no dialogue, there's no scenes. It's all about observation [and] to me that gave all the room for music, for sound and those details.

"She writes visually so to me there's not a scene in the film that doesn't have some details from her book and sometimes it's a whole page, sometimes it's a word."

The movie was filmed in and around Montreal. A Quebec City native, Michaud says that one of his goals was to portray Quebec as "exotic," strange and unfamiliar like Thúy (and in the movie Tihn) perceived it when she first moved to Granby, Que. 

"They were leaving what they knew, they were leaving their world and they were coming to a new world," he said about Thúy's family.

Ginette Casavant remembers when Vietnamese refugees started coming to Quebec after the end of the Vietnam War. At the time she was a principal at a primary school where some newly arrived Vietnamese children attended. She attended the same Ru screening as Bacon.

"I thought we had warmly welcomed them. But when I watched the film, I asked myself if we did enough and if we're still doing enough today," she said. 

In the movie, Tihn's family is sponsored by a Quebec family that helps them adjust to life in Canada. Michaud says that the sponsor family was privileged just like Tihn's family was in Vietnam. 

"I wanted to have like a mirror effect of these things [to show] that we're all the same," he said. 

"It's just that we live geographically at different places, but ultimately we'll sacrifice everything for our children."