Quebec’s hit immigration drama Ru is ‘the story of Canada’

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It was the night before production started on the new Canadian coming-of-age film Ru, and director Charles-Olivier Michaud had a big snow problem. There was none.

The first scene scheduled to be shot was a technically complex tracking sequence that traced the main street of Granby, Que., circa 1979, where a family of Vietnamese “boat people” arrive after enduring a traumatic escape from their home country. For Michaud, as well as author Kim Thuy – whose bestselling memoir the director was adapting – it was crucial that Granby be blanketed with snow, in order to best convey the family’s culture shock, including the disbelief of the film’s central character, the 10-year-old girl Tinh (played by newcomer Chloé Djandji).

Yet it was an unusually unco-operative Quebec winter as the Ru team prepared to shoot in 2022. No snow in January, and none in February, either. Tensions were higher than the temperatures, and six trucks packed with snow were on standby.

“But the night before, when I was giving my newborn baby a bottle at midnight, out of nowhere it started snowing,” Michaud recalls. “It went on for one hour, then two – a true storm! When I arrived on set the next morning, I was like a kid on a snow day, jumping up and down. People thought I won the lottery.”

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That last-minute burst of bad-but-good weather set the stage for what would become the warm-and-fuzzy Québécois hit of 2023, with the largely French-language Ru earning more than $1.75-million at the box office since its theatrical release in the province this past November. That’s a strong figure for any Canadian film, and another feather in the cap for producer Patrick Roy’s upstart Quebec distributor Immina Films, which was born out of the ashes of Entertainment One’s Les Films Séville and has in short order delivered five French-language films that have each earned $1-million-plus theatrically.

But even more impressive for Ru is that, starting this weekend, the film will become one of the few Québécois movies to cross provincial borders and enjoy a healthy run in cinemas across the rest of Canada.

Michaud credits the film’s strong reception to the power of Thuy’s immigration story, which is “so specific to her own life that it ends up becoming universal. I think that people watch it and see their own families in it, no matter where they came from.”

Thuy herself has a different theory.

“It’s all about how beauty is possible, love is possible, after the most traumatic circumstances, thanks to the kindness of strangers,” the author says. “It is a story about the openness of people, the pure intentions of our neighbours. This is the story of Canada.”

But Ru also boasts an improbable full-circle element that could be its own stand-alone movie (or at the very least a short film).

After fleeing Vietnam for Quebec in 1979, with a painful stopover in a Malaysian refugee camp, Thuy and her family settled in Granby, and later Montreal. After cycling through a number of careers, Thuy opened a restaurant called Ru de Nam, where she met a young actor named Karine Vanasse. Despite a decade-plus age gap, the two women became fast friends, with Vanasse eventually buying Thuy a notebook to write down her thoughts and memories.

The resulting freehand text would become the 2009 memoir Ru, which would go on to win the Governor-General’s Literary Award and be translated into 31 languages. And a decade later, now that Vanasse (CTV’s Cardinal, CBC’s Plan B) is one of Canada’s most in-demand actors, Michaud had the perfect person to co-star in the book’s film adaptation as one of the Quebec residents who welcomes the Vietnamese refugees.

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“I needed to be a part of it. I said yes before I even checked my schedule to see if it was possible,” Vanasse says. “When Kim wrote Ru, she was about the age that I am now. So to see the writer and artist that she has become, I’m in awe. And not every author would give the freedom she gave to Charles-Olivier for the film.”

Indeed, Thuy’s book would seem at first glance to be a rather unadaptable work, its non-linear story told through the eyes of Tinh in a largely impressionistic manner that contains little dialogue. Yet together with veteran screenwriter Jacques Davidts (Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique), Michaud transformed Thuy’s words into a film both enigmatic and heartwarming, the narrative oscillating between Tinh’s acclimation to Quebec culture and her fractured memories of Vietnam.

“I had already seen this movie – my movie – while I was writing it, so there was no trouble seeing another version. I wanted something new,” Thuy says. “I felt privileged that Charles-Olivier and his team were interested in giving it a new interpretation. I wanted him to have the same relationship with the book as a reader might. As an author, you cannot impose on the reader what they’re seeing.”

After first meeting with Thuy in 2017, Michaud felt that he could make a movie that was both an immigration story and the tale of an artist discovering her own voice. And it would all be accented with a distinct Québécois sensibility that can be felt in the film’s many period and regional details, from the omnipresence of Kik Cola to an extended third-act scene set at a rural sugar shack.

“The immigration story is there, but it’s the paint on the wall. To me, there is something anthropological about the way that Kim sees the world, the way she digests it and brings it back to the reader,” Michaud says. “The details, the way she describes the neighbours, the community. I wanted to see her world on screen.”

As to whether Ru will find as large an audience in the rest of Canada as it has in Quebec, Vanasse is as optimistic as the day she met Thuy.

“It has the potential to resonate with everyone. There are so many newcomers coming from so many different places, and this allows everyone to look forward, not back,” she says. “Just like the book, the movie is about being taken by the joy of life, of not wanting to miss a single moment of beauty and truth. Everyone wants that.”

Film Review

Ru

Directed by Charles-Olivier Michaud

Written by Jacques Davidts, based on the book by Kim Thuy

Starring Chloé Djandji, Chantal Thuy and Karine Vanasse

Classification PG; 120 minutes

Opens in select theatres Jan. 26

Critic’s Pick

Especially anxious moviegoers may spend the first half-hour of Ru waiting for the other shoe to drop. The film traces the journey of a wealthy Vietnamese family to small-town Quebec after the fall of Saigon, and decades worth of similarly themed culture-shock melodramas have prepared audiences to witness traumatic instances of immigrant suffering – slurs, physical abuse, all manner of prejudice. Yet Charles-Olivier Michaud’s new film, adapting Kim Thuy’s bestselling memoir, has too big a heart for such ugly memories, instead offering a (mostly) warm-welcome story that will win over everyone and anyone.

Rich in period detail and technically slick – a few shots will make you wonder just how large Michaud’s budget was – Ru plays both to and against expectations. The present-day story is largely straightforward, with the pressures of a new life viewed primarily through the perspective of 10-year-old Tinh (Chloé Djandji, projecting a believable sense of wide-eyed intimidation). But then Michaud throws narrative curveballs in the form of stark flashbacks to the family’s escape from their home country. The result is a film that feels both tender and just tough enough, its edges shaved down just so.

Featuring strong supporting performances from Chantal Thuy (as Tinh’s mother) and Karine Vanasse (as a Granby resident eager to give the refugees as soft a landing as possible), Ru serves as the best Welcome to Canada ad that Ottawa could hope for. Wonder what the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship thinks of it.