Scriptwriter and Director: Denis BOIVIN
Script Consultant: Jean-Claude CARRIÈRE

INTRODUCTION

Some contemporary all-terrain vehicles announce the presence of a Huron-Wendat family that lives in an encampment in the heart of the Canadian forest. A vacation atmosphere reigns there. A little girl asks her grandmother why they both carry the same name: Marie. And the grandmother tells her everything that the Huron-Wendat still know today, by tradition: their attachment to Marie Guyart. Our main character will be seen, therefore, through the eyes of the Native-American culture.

Around the campfire, the grandmother tells the story of the woman, the mother, the missionary, and the mysticism which marks the arrival of the French in America. It is a story in history which begins as all stories begin : Once upon a time...

FRENCH PERIOD
(one-third of the movie)

We discover Marie GUYART in a schoolyard when she has reached the same age as the young Wendat girl. The year is 1607. Little Marie GUYART shies away from a group of rural young schoolgirls at play, and runs instead toward a vision of Jesus emanating from an antique religious icon nestled in a cloud. Jesus addresses her and asks : " Do you want to belong to me? "  and she answers, "Yes ! " Immediately, the image disappears and the girl awakens from the trance. Ten years later, we are with her on the eve of her wedding, where she is still talking about her promise to the vision with her mother. Her father, a baker by trade, has already long since solved the issue.

We see quickly that this is an arranged marriage, but that Marie is happy to accomplish her filial sense of obedience. Two years later, in 1621, at the age of twenty, she has a son, Claude. Not long after, her husband dies. A suicide, perhaps, due to an change of fortune? The king had left Tours for Paris and thus lost his supporters. Marie stays, therefore, alone with her debts and a son to feed.

Marie GUYART-MARTIN settles the succession and closes out the business. Her family pressures her to remarry.

For a certain period, she stays confined at home without leaving. One day, in 1620, an apparition of Christ on the Cross appears to her, which she calls " Vision of the Precious Blood ".

The vision of this crucified man makes a strong impression on Marie, rapidly and efficiently. Marie GUYART is completely overwhelmed. She makes confession to the first priest she sees : Dom Bernard. The following day, as though her vision was a damnation, Marie nails some papers to the door of the Cathedral - some papers confessing her faults and revealing her sins for all to see. Dom Bernard stops her firmly. During this troubled period, she teeters on the brink of madness.

We see her living with the imbalance and exaggeration typical of a mystic of that period: lying on a wood cot without mattress, covered by rags of burlap or other material, using silica to inflict pain or drinking absinthe. In a discussion with her worried father and mother, she is asked to work for her brother-in-law, Buisson, who has a transport business. There Marie learns commerce. For ten years she works for him and helps his industry to prosper, enabling him to become the biggest employer in the town of Tours.

During this period, she becomes devout and spends much time with the poor and sick. Secretly, she continues her life of prayer, while at the same time preparing a future income for her son. When he is ten years old, she admits to her family that she wants to take her vows and enter the cloister of the Ursuline Monastery. Her probationary period is three years. She plans to use the salary, that she has never received from the prosperous business that she helped to build, for her own needs and her son’s education. Neither her family nor her convent sisters believe in the serious motives of this new 31-year-old arrival, already fifteen years older than the other novices.

A friendship is born with a young 18-year-old novice, Marie de la Troche, who will become a constant companion. At the convent, Maire-GUYART has new visions, each more and more clear, which lead her to want to establish a girls’ school in Canada. She wavers, therefore, between her dreams of Canada and her will to get there.

She spends ten years in this cloister. Our heroine, under the name of Marie de l’Incarnation, subjects herself to a rigorous education, which results in her becoming the Master of the Novices. Suddenly, a new character arrives on the scene : Madame de la Peltrie, a rich woman who is going to Canada not only for a taste of adventure, but primarily to secure the inheritance of her father by making a marriage in name only to the king’s treasurer, and only then leaving for Canada. It is through this manipulation that Madame de la Peltrie, with her subsequent invitation to Marie to join her, that the Ursulines are able to found a mission in Canada. Marie leaves in the company of several of her sisters, including the young Marie de la Troche, who has a courageous spirit, though a fragile body. The last ordeal that Marie faces before her departure is meeting her son for the last time. Claude opens his heart to his mother and tells her how much he suffers from a lack of maternal love, and reveals his intention to become a priest and missionary.

CANADIAN PERIOD
(the last 2/3 of the film)

The great hardships of the new Ursuline Monastery and great doubts of Marie GUYART’s own vocation start as soon as they arrive in Canada. In the first winter, small pox, probably imported by the French, decimates the native population at the basin of the great river, the St. Lawrence. The natives nickname the monastery " the House of Death ".

In quick succession, Marie is handed several big blows: her novice son passes through a period of homosexuality, swerving from his vows for some time; Madame de la Peltrie, their sponsor, leaves on an adventure to found the city of Montreal with Jeanne Mance and Maissoneuve, leaving the young Ursuline community in absoute poverty.

Marie continues, however, her teaching of the young native Indian girls. One of them, Sokotis, runs away to rejoin her father, and live with Tourangeau, a French trapper. This young French Huguenot, in love with the native girl Sokotis, who is promised to the Catholic governor of Trois Rivières, confronts the real question of the religious missions of this period : On whose religious beliefs, Native, Protestant, or Catholic, should the laws of the country be based upon?

The Hurons, traders and allies of the French, are nearly destroyed by the Iroquois. For Marie, this adds more grief to a series of tragedies. Her son, having become a priest, falls in love with a young girl to whom he has been giving spiritual guidance.

The Hurons set up camp in Quebec near the Ursulines, and during the same winter, the Ursuline monastery in Canada is razed by fire. At the same time, Sokotis dies in childbirth with her first son, whose father is the Governor.

Due to the Iroquois massacre, all the missionaries are called back to France and Italy. The Ursulines refuse to leave. They do not want to leave the colonists, and they want to safeguard their religion in the new country. They stay alone, against the Iroquois. Added to this misery comes the death of Marie de la Troche. She has a painful death, orchestrated by a devious shaman, the native spiritual leader and doctor, Geneviève, a Huron woman and mother of Sokotis, who wants to avenge her dead daughter. During this period, Les Relations des Jésuites which speaks of the mission at the other end of the Atlantic, stops being circulated in France because the Jesuits had abandoned Canada; as a result of this lack of a news media, not many people then or even now, know that a series of earthquakes shook Quebec during that year of 1663.

These earthquakes, violent enough to break all the dishes, crack the stone walls, and make the church bells ring, are perceived as a divine protection against the Iroquois. But the population of Quebec was afraid also, and admits to thinking it was the apocalypse.

The last winter, scattered with skirmishes, is lived in the constant fear of Iroquois attacks. The new priest soon tried to convince the population that all that happened was a punishment for the trade in alcohol.

After this big period of misery, during which the colony was managed by the " La Compagnie des Cent-Associés " (the Company of a Hundred Associates), the Carignan Regiment arrives in Quebec with its 1,600 soldiers. From this point on, everything changes. The whole spirit of helping one another - and the spirit of a primitive church that had been lived for more than twenty-five years by the founders of the Ursulines in Canada, will collapse, in exchange for Tracy’s military system. With his regiment, he offers the security of the colony and makes a chapel for the Ursulines to solidify their monastery and their mission.

However, the honeymoon with the establishment of New France did not last any longer for Marie GUYART than the time of Tracy’s presence – two years. Marie, seeing well before the people of her time the destructive return of the English, asks Tracy to " plant crosses with the fleur-de-lys in the face of the English. "

At the time of the establishment of the Royal Regime, Marie GUYART leads her last battle, which is to defend those for whom she had come – the natives. The    intendant, Talon, realises that his regime of enslavement of the Native-Americans in the Ursuline Monastery for the hemp industry is doomed to failure. The Ursuline, Marie GUYART, comes to the defense of the natives and demands their freedom ; she even demands that they be taught in their Native-American language.

During the massive arrival of the French, Geneviève, about whose true name we know nothing, departs, leaving behind her the broken dreams of Marie GUYART. This Native-American is the embodiment of the drama of the native people. Her relations with Marie represent the clash of the two cultures : two lives crossed. The daughter of the one culture could have married the son of the other. Here the earth and the sky mourn for them – not being able to meet each other and live together. On the other side of the Atlantic, the son Claude reads his mother’s last letter. He understands now that it was his mother who led the young girl to whom he had given spiritual guidance to take the veil. The letter explains to him also the last secrets of the spiritual life of his mother, whom we consider to be the mother of Canada.

When we return to our contemporary Huron-Wendat family, they are leafing through the pages of two autobiographical books discovered by the grandfather in the attic of an isolated chapel in the forest. These are the autobiographies of Marie Guyart and her dictionaries. They give to the little girl hope of relearning the Wendat language lost by the French assimilation.