May Flowers
A feature-length documentary.co-directed by myself and Chris Frey, covering one month in the life of a city during pandemic times, stranded somewhere between Covid’s worst wave and the first glimmers of light. “Maybe this May will be the last of the bad months before things start to get better.”
In May 1962, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme travelled the streets of Paris asking people such questions as are you happy? and do you feel optimistic about the future? They asked sometimes prying personal questions and about the politics of the day. Their timing had significance: the French had just voted in favour of ending the colonialist war in Algeria, marking the first time in 23 years that the country was not at war. The filmmakers called it “the first springtime of peace”.
Marker and Lhomme’s film, Le joli mai, premiered on May 1st the following year. There was an irony to the title, as one critic pointed out: “In the answers they got, happiness was rarely the dominant note…”
As longtime Marker fans, we found ourselves again revisiting Le joli mai in the early spring of 2021. The moment before us in Toronto, were we live, offered its own loose parallel. After more than a year of grinding lockdown restrictions and devastating human losses, vaccines were finally and chaotically going into arms, offering what looked like our first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But the city was also in the middle of its third and most alarming wave of infections to date.
Doing unplanned streeters as Marker did seemed out of the question when any sort of public interactions were subject to the public health restrictions. Filming largely in parks, alleyways, backyards, and front porches, we interviewed 32 people over the course of May; 25 of them appear in the final version of the film. Some are friends, some are friends of friends recommended to us, and about a third were people previously unknown to us who we came to through happenstance. Other images and moments from that May are also captured.
Our hope was to create a portrait of the city during what seemed a deeply fraught and transitional moment in time.
Directed, produced, and written by Chris Frey and Patrick Pittman
Camera + editing: Chris Frey
Sound recording + mixing: Patrick Pittman
Narration: Naomi Skwarna
Music: Bram Gielen
Colour: Zach Cox
Graphic art: Michèle Champagne