Harmonium in California

The scouts

Most docs would've made this a straightforward 'band goes to America' story, but Fortier's willingness to tangle Harmonium's commercial ambitions with Lévesque's political machinery—treating both as equally absurd cultural export—is genuinely perverse in the best way.

A beautifully composed document of a specific historical moment, where the formal restraint of observational cinema meets the inherent drama of cultural diplomacy; Fortier positions himself in a lineage of political documentarians while letting the archive speak with elegant understatement.

The real move here is how Fortier lets the *silence* between songs and speeches do the work—that gap where you feel the gap between what Harmonium wanted to be and what they were being *used* to be is where the whole film lives.