Karine Vanesse in Polytechnique

Star Produces Hard Hitting Film on the Montreal Massacre of 1989

Mar 17, 2009 Anne Brodie

It is nearly twenty years since a troubled student went on a killing spree inside Montreal's L'Ecole Polytechnique. A new film pays tribute to the victims.

Polytechnique is a gripping, hard-to-watch dramatization of the Montreal Massacre of Dec. 6th, 1989, when Marc Lepine murdered fourteen female engineering students with a shotgun before killing himself.

Police later recovered a suicide note in his home which read, in part “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. For seven years life has brought me no joy and being totally blasé, I have decided to put an end to those viragos."

Montreal actress Karine Vanesse became aware of the shootings ten years after the horrific events, while attending a meeting of the December 6th Victims Foundation Against Violence.

"With them that night, I first had the point of view that there was much more of an emotional reaction”, she told me. “That night I knew I would someday do a film on it.”

Vanesse embarked on a long and difficult journey contacting and interviewing survivors, victims’ family members and police. Eventually, she spoke with Lepine's mother.

“We learned what his life was like. You can talk about his childhood and he had violent father and transferred from family to family. His mother raised him by herself and worked and managed everything by giving him to other families. He had a difficult childhood, but who didn’t? The police say at 18 something changed for him. His grades went down. He had been a good student. He was rejected by the Polytechnique and the army, but you can’t point to one event. That’s what’s so difficult. If he were here today, it would be easier but he committed suicide. We will never know. It’s scary that we can’t fault one thing, there is no recipe for what he did.”

Vanesse discovered that Lepine fit the profile of school aged mass murderers in the tragedies at Columbine, the Amish school in Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech.

“Like the shooter in Virginia, you could see they were isolated and don’t communicate that much. The profile of the guy in Germany (March 11) is that he was not that lonely. The lesson is that you have to be attentive and aware.”

Vanesse is philosophical about the difficulties of researching writing and making the film.

“When we shot it we had in mind all the interviews we’ve done with the actual students so I guess with all these testimonies we never could say it was difficult, nothing compared to the event. We wanted to be true to what they told us. It’s bizarre when you shoot a story like that with the real story in mind. You couldn’t say ‘let’s do the scene this way or that, or do a spectacular effect or some brilliant acting. We couldn’t think about the film that way. Everyone put their egos aside.”

Even as protests rang out, Vanesse never doubted the film would be made. She knew she couldn’t do it without gaining the trust of the families.

“Even when there was no support in Québec for the film, we decided to continue. When the film was released there, we had pressure, but we had total respect for the ones who survived the tragedy and the ones who didn’t. We had private screenings for the families, students, Marc’s mother, and we talked with them afterwards. That allowed us to do a promotional tour, because it would have been weird to do a one without knowing what they thought.”

Vanesse hopes to release Polytechnique internationally.

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