The Last of the Franco-Ontarians
1996 · 57m · Canada
Genres: essay film, experimental, satire
Tones: surreal, theatrical, whimsical
Poet Pierre Albert stages a gala in Fauquier to mark the supposed death of the last Franco-Ontarian, drawing in his father Antoine, invited artists and a mischievous Spectre figure.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A poet staging a mock funeral for an entire cultural identity, complete with a literal ghost—this is the kind of premise that makes you sit up and ask if the film is grieving or trolling, and it refuses to pick a lane. The surreal theater of it all, the refusal to be earnest about its own subject, is exactly the move that makes consensus critics nervous and makes this worth fighting for.
The film's genealogy is clear—it traces a line through Quebec experimental cinema and essay filmmaking, using the gala as a formal frame for cultural meditation with theatrical precision. There's a considered restraint in how it stages death and inheritance, situating itself knowingly in a tradition of reflective, formally rigorous shorts.
The decision to introduce the Spectre as a tonal instrument—neither fully supernatural nor merely metaphorical—is what allows the whole thing to breathe; it's the hinge that lets satire and elegy coexist without the film having to choose, and on what feels like a modest NFB production, that's the move that makes it work.