True North documentary examines Montreal's pivotal role in Black Power movement
Filmmaker Michèle Stephenson unearths Montreal's 1968-69 moment as a global nexus of Black liberation struggle, from the Congress of Black Writers to the Sir George Williams uprising.
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Montréal's role as a flashpoint in the global Black Power movement is the subject of True North: Canadian Myths and Black Power, a documentary by Haitian-born filmmaker Michèle Stephenson that excavates the city's radical history.
The film centers on the 1969 occupation of Sir George Williams University's computer labs, when more than 400 students and activists protested the racism of a white professor. The uprising was met with violent police repression orchestrated by the Canadian government and Montreal police. For Stephenson, the event was part of a broader moment: just months earlier, in October 1968, Montreal hosted the Congress of Black Writers at McGill, considered the largest Black Power conference held outside the United States. The intellectual ferment at that congress sowed the seeds for the Sir George Williams occupation.
"Students are a moral compass. They are the measure of our society's humanity," Stephenson said in the film. "They are always at the forefront of questioning repression."
Stephenson sees continuity between that moment and today's student activism. The contemporary pro-Palestinian student movement, she argues, extends the work begun at Sir George Williams, just as her own generation marched against South African apartheid on Canadian campuses. "All of this is the result of decades and decades of work," she said.
Born in Haiti and exiled as an infant when her family fled the Duvalier regime, Stephenson grew up in Quebec's Eastern Townships before attending CEGEP in Montreal, then McGill and Carleton universities. The absence of Black Canadian history from school curricula struck her deeply. "It's such a rich Canadian Black history that was stolen from me," she said.
The archival work behind True North was colossal, spanning years. In the National Film Board's vaults, her team discovered a folder simply labeled "les Noirs"—a lazy, somewhat racist categorization that motivated them to dig deeper. The folder contained discoveries that ultimately shaped the film. "That's when we realized the work we were doing was necessary," Stephenson noted. For her, making the documentary was a healing process, one that brought her through anger and joy as she witnessed Black bodies represented in historical footage. The film documents what she describes as "a process of re-archiving to interrupt the silence and the empty spaces that exist."
