Behind closed doors in a car, three friends from the small town of Sept-Îles discuss their desire to reconnect with the North Shore, the region where they grew up.

In 1976, a young punk lands in Natashquan. It’s the beginning of an unlikely love story between a small fishing community and this new arrival. Yet the relationship meets a brutal end when, three years later, the punk disappears without a trace. Forty years have now gone by, and the village of Natashquan is experiencing a slow, irreversible devitalization—one by one, villagers have been going missing. Those who tell the tale of the punk today see it as the story of a small community’s symbolic survival.

Documentary filmed at the end of the Manic-Outardes hydroelectric projects on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence (1978) to pay tribute to the men and women who participated, for 20 years, in the first collective project in modern Quebec. Le Temps de la Manic allows us to follow live the moving end of this era in the company of Jean-Noël Laprise nicknamed “the Switch”, Andrée Laprise (Grenier) his partner, their 4 children Carole, Serge, Yvan and Hélène, by Édouard Hovington and Véronique Hovington, by Camille Brisson, Léo Boisclair, Denis Ouellet, Gérard Debigaré and Fernande Buissière. Everyone has experienced the time of the Manic adventure from the inside. The Prime Minister, Mr. René Lévesque, also appears in the film.

In the 1970s, young people from Baie-Comeau – Hauterive sought to take their place in an industrial society dedicated to work and consumption. Often left to their own devices while waiting to enter the job market, many of them seek their paths in artistic creation. The feast of St. John 74 gives them an opportunity to shout their existence loud and clear and to shake up the existing order. We follow them here in their adventure and their reality.