Polytechnique

1. In 1989, a young man killed fourteen women at Montreal’s Polytechnique school of engineering with a Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine. In 2009’s Polytechnique, the tragedy is fictionalized in deep focus black and white that clarifies every bullet hole. There is the placid face of the young man pausing to reload his carbine. And you, the …

What value does fiction have in the interpretation of a historical event? This question can become central to the reception and understanding of historical films and has taken on important resonance in past years in regards to films like Ben Affleck’s Argo or Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. These films are not documentaries; however they …