The film opens and closes with the heart-warming sounds of Quebec singer-songwriter Robert Charlebois. Martin and Gabrielle not only sing Charlebois’ songs, but clearly live them. Their choir, Les Muses de Montréal, is reminiscent of the well-known Theater Hora and the piece Disabled Theater, which won the Alfred Kerr Prize at the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2013. The film, like the controversial theatre piece, challenges our perception of people with disabilities; and both explore the tension between wanting to protect your adult child with a disability and allowing him/her to live as independent and full a life as possible.
Archambault’s camera gets close up and personal with her film’s protagonists. We see her heroine as she goes about her daily life – from getting her haircut with her liberal sister (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) to changing her pad in the bathroom of the group home where she lives. The filmmaker also effectively illustrates how little privacy the residents of the group home have, for example when the mother of Gabrielle’s boyfriend Martin (Alexandre Landry) barges into her room and orders her half-dressed son to leave and then proceeds to forcibly end the relationship between the two...
GABRIELLE was last summer’s audience award winner at the Locarno Film Festival and will surely tug at a few hearts around here.

Raphaël Rück