Actress, screenwriter and director, Ève Saint-Louis's film The Journey is the story of a father and daughter reunion. From Montreal’s snowy airport, father and daughter travel along a sometimes treacherous, sometimes chaotic path. The instability of the car's path unveils a complicated and toxic relationship, that sees them drift from their initial course irrevocably.

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After a year away from home, Chantale, who now lives and studies in Paris, returns to Quebec City to spend the Holidays with her mother and sister. Against all odds, her father, with whom she has a contentious relationship, has offered to pick her up at the airport and drive her there. Hesitant about seeing him again, she accepts his offer nonetheless.The Journey, tells the story of their reunion: a path strewn with obstacles, where nothing goes as planned. As night falls and the Father deviates from the planned route, Chantale will be faced with the hold he has on her, and will need to take action.

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Ève Saint-Louis ‘What I find interesting are the certainties and taboos surrounding the family core. There isa strong belief you should forgive your family everything and defend it as if it were a sacred space. But then, what happens when such a relationship becomes toxic and to what point must it be endured? It was important for me to translate into images the idea that parentage does not guarantee intimacy, and that sometimes family can feel like strangers.

I started writing this film when I felt the need to express myself on the father-daughter relationship, which I find fascinating and largely untapped in cinema. This sentence from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Intérieurs [Interiors] has very much inspired me:

“They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed the door, and they don’t know that something always happens in souls and that the world does not end at the doors of houses.”

I hoped to bring the audience to a place where an outsider may not enter, namely the very fabric of a family. I wanted to question the repercussions of a conflicting relationship and psychological abuse on a child, once she has become a young adult. I wished to explore anxiety and its devastating effects, but also the limits which push an individual to take action towards his own survival.’

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