Vous êtes ici 2016
The trip to Paris that resulted in the short film Cinephile, got me thinking about Paris as an epicentre of mass tourism. The city clearly had been a major tourist destination for generations: people from all around the world came to visit Paris, and people from all around the world made a living from tourism in Paris. I decided I wanted to explore that.
Wanda and I sublet an apartment in Montmartre for a few months, about a 10-minute staircase climb from Sacre Couer, but on the north side of the butte, where tourists rarely ventured. Because I don’t speak French, I needed to hire someone who could help me as a translator, and was very fortunate to come across a young cinema student from Romania who lived in Paris: Anita Draghici. Anita spoke fluent French, excellent English, impeccable Romanian, and a bit of Italian.
Anita and I spent time a lot of time in some of the central sites of Parisian tourism: Sacre Couer and the nearby Place du Tetre in Montmartre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower. We took boat and bus and walking tours. We chatted with tourists from all around the world about the experiences they were having in Paris, and we talked to all types of people whose living depended on tourism: bus drivers, waiters, tour guides, street performers, guidebook writers, and the men who sold tiny Eiffel Towers and had to run every time the police showed up.
I brought a Sony video camera from Canada that shot on HDV tapes, and while in Paris I acquired a first generation Canon Rebel DSLR camera that recorded HD video on SD cards.
I had a great summer. Because Wanda and I had been in Paris for long enough, we were eligible to be married there, and after Anita helped us wade through the French bureaucracy, we were wed in the Mairie of the 18th arrondissement by a man wearing a Tricolore sash. We checked into the Hotel Regina across from the Louvre, and had dinner at Brasserie Lipp.
Editing the film took some time. There was a lot of footage that went in a bunch of different directions, and a lot of the footage had people speaking in French and Romanian, which I needed to have translated. I was also clinging to Final Cut Pro 7, years after Apple stopped supporting it and moved to an amateur version of Final Cut. But over time I worked out a structure with Wanda’s help, and finally started making progress.
While I was making VEI, I always had Alexander Payne’s contribution to the anthology film Paris, je t’aime in mind, reminding myself that every tourist is having a very personal experience.
Vous êtes ici belongs in a category that I call the “collected and assembled” films; (stories from) The Land of Cain is another as is Project Pedestrian, which is in production in 2026. The “collected and assembled” films start with some ideas to explore when I’m shooting, but it’s really only in editing that I figure out what the film is. Working this way was inspired by filmmakers I have a lot of time for: Agnes Varda, Ross McElwee, Chris Marker, Peter Mettler. Some of my most satisfying creative experiences have been working on the “collected and assembled” films.
Kyrie Kristmanson, who I first met when she was a teenage musician in Regina and who appeared with her band Rah Rah in River, had relocated to Paris as a young adult, and she kindly let me use her song Montmarte, which plays under the final moments of the film.
By the time the film got released in 2016, we were in a very different film festival world than when I started making films. The amount of money most film festivals charge to submit work was not something I was prepared to pay at this point of my “career”. I focused on submitting the film to the small number of festivals that didn’t charge submission fees, but coupled with the explosion in the number of films being made with digital tools and submitted to festivals, it meant that it was getting difficult to get festival screenings.
I had a few public screenings that were fun to be at, but for the most part the film exists online. The film won an award at the Saskatchewan Independent Film Awards in a year when some really good features got released, which allows me to believe that some people thought the film was interesting.
