CQ2

Rachel, a 17 year old teenager, waits on the street-bench across the street from the women’s prison in east-end Montreal. She is too lucid about the people around her, about what’s going on in general and it hurts. Her rage to live seems to be hurling from within her. Inside the prison good Jeanne, a contemporary dancer, is purging a short sentence with steel-like patience which she maintains by following an intense physical training program. She becomes friendly with Odile, a non-working mother whose breakdown precipitated a destructive rampage. She was imprisoned for the minor property damages done. The day Jeanne is released from prison, Rachel, instinctively follows her. Little by little she manages to become part of Jeanne’s life. Jeanne can recognize the fault lines in the personality of the young woman and helps her with the only tool she knows: dance. Jeanne and Odile can see that Rachel’s talent for dance allows her to transcend her depression; contemporary dance, a dance where her revolt finds expression, opens her up to others, to her sexuality, to the first measures of self-fulfillment as an artist. And just as Rachel is coming of age, at the moment she least suspects it’s presence, her destiny will have her confront violence once more.