Raftsmen Rowing with Danger
2021 · 17m · Canada
Directed by André Desrochers
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Veteran raftsman Aimé Guérin, known as Le Vieux Prince, spends more than sixty years running wooden rafts through dangerous rapids without losing a single crew member, carrying on a two-century tradition.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is just a straight hagiography of a guy who was really good at his job—where's the rupture, the doubt, the thing that makes you question the whole mythology? It's competent heritage filmmaking, but it doesn't subvert a single thing about the documentary form or the legend it's preserving.
Desrochers locates this portrait within a lineage of Canadian documentary that honors craft and witness—the two-century tradition isn't just subject matter, it's formally echoed in the film's own patience and compositional rigor, making Le Vieux Prince's mastery inseparable from the film's own measured gaze.
The film lives or dies on Desrochers' decision to let silence and water-sound do the narrative work instead of voice-over—that absence of explanation is what transforms a survival record into something mythic, and it's the kind of restraint that costs nothing but changes everything.