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The Fifth Province
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The search for paradise is one way we express the human journey, a journey marked by turning points, watersheds. At these moments, consciousness dawns: our lives seem to begin for the first time. A curtain is drawn between the future and the past.
Filmed in Canada, France, Latvia, Cyprus and Africa, The Fifth Province examines lives that have been irrevocably changed: Latvians exiled by war in 1944, a German photographer defined by the Nazi inheritance, a French novelist haunted by the death of his father when he was still a child, the plight of a Greek-Cypriot woman in the wake of the Turkish invasion in 1974, a massacre in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.
Behind their stories, ghosts whisper from objects that outlive our mortal selves-stones, buildings and personal belongings-watches, bicycles, snapshots, journals.
The Fifth Province addresses the interconnectedness of human experience. With startling imagery and provocative anecdote, animation and optical effects, song and poetry, filmmaker Donald McWilliams draws upon the rich resources of cinema in his search for that happy place: the "fifth province."
2002, 72 min 26 s
