Together, we unite the people of Baie-Saint-Paul

Together, we unite the people of Baie-Saint-Paul (2 min 09 s)

Added on September 22, 2015

Description

Clément Turgeon, General Manager and Artistic Director of Le Festif! de Baie-Saint-Paul, describes how Desjardins helped launch the festival, which was originally created to fight against the rural exodus of the younger generation.

Together, we unite the people of Baie-Saint-Paul (2 min 09 s)

Added on September 22, 2015 | Desjardins Group

Note: The information between brackets describes the visual and audio content of the video that is not dialogue or narration.

[Text on the screen: Together, we unite the people of Baie-Saint-Paul. Clément Turgeon, General Manager and Artistic Director of Le Festif de Baie-Saint-Paul]

[The scene takes place in Baie-Saint-Paul. Clément speaks to the camera.]

[Ambient music.]

Clément Turgeon: Le Festif is fundamentally a cultural organisation made up of young people from Charlevoix. And it's also the main event: Le Festif de Baie-Saint-Paul, a summer music, street, art and circus arts festival that has been taking place at the end of July each summer since 2009.

[While he speaks, Clément shows the program for “Le Festif! De Baie-Saint-Paul présenté par Desjardins” with the Desjardins logo, and a series of programs for earlier editions.]

[Cut back to Clément in front of the river and successive shots of Baie-Saint-Paul: the town, the water, surrounding valley, and so on.]

Clément Turgeon: One of the issues that we noticed at the time in 2009 was the rural exodus phenomenon. A lot of young people were leaving for Québec City, Saguenay or Montréal for school but they weren't coming back to the region, or they didn't have a sense of belonging to Baie-Saint-Paul. We didn't have events that brought young people together. Le Festif was finally a solution to this.

Our first project with Desjardins, our first partnership, was a contest set up by Les caisses Desjardins. Then we won first prize. We won a grant that enabled us to hire the first artists, so we hired Les Cowboys Fringants. Thus, it's really Desjardins that helped us make the first edition take off so quickly.

[Clément walks through the streets of town, his back to the camera. A view of the church and the Thomas Tremblay school.]

Clément Turgeon: We also had Daniel Bélanger, Les Cowboys fringants, Louis-Jean Cormier, Robert Charlebois and Lisa Leblanc. So we had quite a few of them. Every night there was a show.

[Shot of the streets of Baie-Saint-Paul.]

[Long shot of Clément and his father seated on the porch of an old house, beside one another, facing the camera.]

Clément Turgeon: My father, I call him the “manager of facilities”, while my mom took care of finances and my brother was at the bar. My family developed an expertise, so if they said “We can't do this anymore, we've had enough, we're stopping,” we would have quite a hill to climb, because this is an expertise developed over six years.

[View of tourists walking in the streets of Baie-Saint-Paul.]

[Shot of a column displaying the city logo, which reads “Baie-Saint-Paul Ville d'art et de patrimoine,” meaning “Baie-Saint-Paul, City of Art and Heritage”.]

[Cut back to the father and son.]

[Text on the screen: Claude Thériault, Clément's father and Facilities Manager]

Claude Thériault: In the most recent editionwe just had, where there were 20,000 people walking around Baie-Saint-Paul, I told myself “All of this business, it came from his head!” I must say as a father that it's pretty impressive! It's the work of an artist. I'm very proud.

As I have already written on Facebook: “To see the sun, you need to shovel away the clouds.” This is truly the case here.

[Image on the screen: Landscape of Baie-Saint-Paul]

[Text on the screen: To the millions of Desjardins members, thank you]

[Image on the screen: the Desjardins logo DESJARDINS.COM/Together]