Filmmaking is often understood as self-reflective. Martin Scorsese said film’s purpose is “to find out who the hell I am.”
Like with other art forms, film often represents a blend of external influences and a filmmaker’s own traits. It’s what makes a Scorsese film a Scorsese film. You feel as though no one else but him could’ve directed Goodfellas.
But what happens when a filmmaker’s goal is to chronicle something specifically due to its absence from their personal experience? How do you capture something you haven’t lived (or remember having lived) first-hand?
This idea is what drives Antoine Bourges’s filmmaking.
"There was mainly a curiosity in life, rather than a curiosity in films, that made me want to be a filmmaker," said Bourges.
For him, there’s a joy of everyday living that he strives to catch on film — the kind that feels increasingly inaccessible in today’s world.
"You feel like there’s something about everyday life that you’re not experiencing in your life because it’s all happening so fast and everything is so slippery, and you just can’t quite experience it," Bourges said.
"It comes from a desire to stop everything and to be able to have a pure experience of it, or a better experience of it."
Bourges works to bring a sense of unconventional filmmaking to his role as a film professor at UBC’s theatre and film department too. It’s a challenge to navigate a university’s traditional grading mechanisms in a discipline as creative as filmmaking.
"In every assignment that I give or anything that I grade, there are a lot of objective things that I try to introduce in there to make sure that students have learned certain rules, but also try to make room for them to break those rules."
Making the ordinary bigger
There’s something warmly relatable about trying to capture ordinary magic — and we’ve consistently rewarded such art with fame and acclaim. The unremarkable is what lent works like Celine Song’s Past Lives or Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film their emotional notoriety — to take the ordinary and make it feel bigger.
However, Bourges’s ambitions are a bit different. His 2012 docufiction film East Hastings Pharmacy is nothing like those two works. It follows the day-to-day existence of a clinic in Vancouver’s East Hastings neighbourhood that, among other things, works in harm reduction by providing prescribed doses of methadone to people who engage with substance use.
Methadone is an opioid used to help soften opioid withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of infection from needle use since it is taken orally.
The film doesn’t really follow any traditional storytelling principles, and in all honesty could be summed up as high quality security camera footage.
However, as you watch the film, you begin to get a sense of what life as a pharmacist or pharmacy customer is like. You begin to recognize the regulars, banter between the pharmacist and the pharmacy technician at lunch warms you. The old cartoons on the box TV hanging above the liminal waiting room — a sense of ordinary humanity begins to permeate this initially clinical docufiction film.
In 2016, four years after East Hastings Pharmacy was released, the province declared the toxic drug crisis a public health emergency due to rising opioid-related deaths. In 2023, BC recorded its highest number of drug-related deaths ever at 2,500.
Despite that declaration, Vancouver has been included in the Global Liveability Rankings’ top 10 every year (except 2021) since 2002. Its consistent performance in this index in the face of a deepening toxic drug crisis highlights the widening gap between people who do and do not engage in substance use. For Bourges, the goal is to remind viewers that this gap is much, much smaller than we think.
"When you start spending time with characters or with people and they’re in frame, I think it’s harder to see them as other," said Bourges.
Watch the movie and you begin to realize just how much you have in common with the film’s characters. They make silly jokes with each other in the waiting area; they wear Canucks merch; they have kids to take care of; they have hopes, ambitions and ideas for what they want to do.
"You start building a kind of subconscious connection with them," said Bourges.
There are moments in the film that seem awkward, like the feeling of uncomfortably hanging by the hallway waiting for someone in the room to respond or look toward you. Scenes last longer than it feels it should and characters linger on screen well after their dialogue is complete. This is intentional and is meant to directly contrast typical quick cuts between actors that, for Bourges, encourage a separation between audience and film subject.
"If you cut for two seconds and cut back to the action, what [the audience receives] is, 'Oh, an unhoused person, a poor something' — it would just be a kind of label," said Bourges.
Letting the camera linger
Bourges’s works have often heavily centred on themes of social change. His most recent work, a drama called Concrete Valley (2022), revolves around Syrian immigrants Rashid and Farah as they struggle with their new life in Toronto. Prior to that, 2017’s Fail to Appear tracks the relationship between a social services caseworker and her client as they navigate a criminal trial.
"If you leave your camera there and spend more time with this person, then this first impression might stay there a little bit. But then other things will come up, like, 'Oh, that person actually talks like my uncle' ... they will become more human to you, and you’ll connect with them more."
And this connection is mediated by the fact that Bourges opts to work with a primarily non-professional cast with limited or no acting background. While partially a result of resource or budget constraints, it also helps him draw from a more diverse set of realities.
"If you look on any casting website, a lot of the actors tend to come from a similar social background, tend to look a little bit the same in terms of ethnic background and stuff like that."
For a filmmaker whose characters vary across race, gender and cultural background, this is a pressing criterion. There are some things non-actors do that actors have been trained out of, said Bourges, and sometimes imitating reality isn’t close enough — you have to collaborate with people who live in it.
"[With non-actors], you don’t necessarily know what they think sometimes," said Bourges. "That’s very moving to me, and that’s very strange, that’s very unsettling sometimes."
Post-Script
As with any creative, I asked Bourges to give me his four favourite films (Letterboxd style).
Film 1: Blissfully Yours by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
“I felt like I was completely connected with the time of the film, because the film was also quite dreamy and slow, and I felt extremely moved at the end.”
Film 2: Comment je me suis disputé (ma vie sexuelle) by Arnaud Desplechin
“It’s just the film that I’ve watched 1,000 times, because I would play it in the background when I would be cooking or when I would just do anything. It was just my radio in the background. It’s an incredibly rich film.”
Film 3: Tale of Cinema by Hong Sang-soo
“It’s kind of hard to discuss, but it’s just a very beautiful film, and it talks about how we experience life and how we experience films.”
Film 4: L. Cohen by James Benning
“When I saw it in a festival a few years ago, people were just bawling by the end … even though there’s not a single human or animal … if I tell you about this film, I will totally spoil it, because only one thing happens in it, and you need to see it to see it happen.”
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