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DERVILA COOKE mentions the comfort provided on his first day of school by a kind teacher, Nicholai Nicolevitch, of Romanian origin, who makes a point of welcoming all new students by name and of saying a few words to them in their own language. Twenty years later, Akos is still struck by the fact that Nicolevitch pronounced his name correctly. Akos reflects on the difficulty of exile, of having to leave his friends behind and receiving no special dispensation from his mother due to having immigrated (he left Hungary on a Friday and started school in Montreal the following Monday). Expecting to be in a normal class, "une classe normale", he was in fact placed in language support. Like Marco Micones Nino in the abovementioned autobiographical hybrid work Le Figuier enchanté, he is a bright student who suddenly finds himself unable to communicate. The blockage remains painful in Akos’s memory. Teachers like “Monsieur Nicolas”, who he clearly remembers with great affection, softened the transition, and no doubt allowed him to feel a connection between his homeland and school. BECOMING QUEBECOIS AND THE QUESTION OF VALUES: GODBOUT AND ALOISIO As previously shown, Farouk, Ruba, and Akos place greater emphasis on their adopted “Québécois” culture, whereas Daniel emphasizes his Latin American legacy. This question of prior culture comes into sharp focus in Aloisio’s film, which has several key points in common with Godbout’s production. One of the aims of Aloisio’s film is to show that painful situations have arisen due to lack of adequate attention by the Québec government to the prior culture, or in some cases the home culture, of children of immigrant extraction, both in the past and, to some extent, still today. Aloisio highlights the vulnerability of children who were among the very first to experience compulsory schooling in French, such as Tihana, who, as a Croatian-speaking child, was expected to function with no support in mainstream French class as a small child in Québec city, in the early years of Bill 101. Likewise, Courtney, who is of Anglophone Jamaican origin, experienced trauma by being thrust into a strict and highly monitored French-speaking school environment as a very young child, with little or no acknowledgement of his difference or cultural heritage. He went on to find it very difficult to reconcile the Jamaican and Québécois elements of his identity as a child in late 1970s and early 1980s Québec. In Aloisio’s film, Guerina (who, like Aloisio, is of Italian heritage) is a strong counter example to Courtney, as she is more comfortable in French than in her heritage language, and has been committed since her teenage years to the Québécois cause of self-determination. We see impassioned interactions between Guerina and her parents, who are opposed to the imposition of + 180 +
