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In Les Borges, filmmaker Marilù Mallet profiles the Portuguese community in Montreal, focusing on the Borges family. The parents, now in their sixties, and the adult children speak of their arrival in Canada and their integration into Quebec society with all its challenges. Marilù Mallet, who immigrated to Canada from Chile, speaks of the making of the film.

Q) At the time you were shooting the film, in 1977, you had just recently moved to Canada after fleeing the dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. As a political refugee, how did your views on immigration, at the time, differ from those of a filmmaker born in Canada?

I came here from Chile in 1973. Yes, I had fled the dictatorship of General Pinochet and when I got to Quebec, I felt very comfortable. Quebec was like another country to me in any case; it was like coming to a country much like the one I had left. My origins are French and I found people here to be like me, even physically. I didn’t see much difference. It was when I presented Les Borges that I realized other people saw me as different. For that film, I approached a producer here at the NFB who told me, “Listen, there’s funding at Canadian Heritage, you need to find a topic on immigration because that’s the only way you’ll be able to make a film.” So that’s where the idea for Les Borges came from. I chose the Portuguese community because it seemed to me they were a group the Québécois saw as being more sympathique than other groups. It was a group that was easy to locate geographically – around St. Lawrence Boulevard, the market, and Roy Street. A lot of Portuguese had bought houses, and painted them in brighter colours. They had a kind of communal life and that’s what I liked, that’s what decided me. I thought, OK, there’s some prejudice, people see me as an outsider, so I’m going to try to do a portrait of a community that has been genuinely welcomed here, that people are friendly and less prejudiced towards. So that was why. As far as my views on immigration at the time… I could see there was a big difference. You might say that people who were political refugees, like me, were usually more educated or middle-class people from Latin America, while most immigrants to Quebec were from the working class or peasantry who came here to look for work. There’s no doubt their motivation was very different from mine. As for the perspective of a Canadian-born filmmaker… I don’t know what the difference would be. At the time, I think Quebec filmmakers were also looking at the working class. There are a lot of films that do that, Jacques Leduc’s and others. At the time, most filmmakers were looking for working class subjects. That’s what was happening. It was a period of change, so we wanted to give people outside our own social class a voice.

Q) Did you feel closer to the concerns of those people, what they were going through, their worries and problems?

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