Passiflora (1986)

This bold "graffiti" essay on the Pope, Michael Jackson, the Olympic stadium, and the manipulation of the masses, provided a fresh glimmer of hope in a decade of institutional complacency. In Passiflora (named after the anaesthetic tropical flower), the animation, "new music", street theater and dramatization deployed builds on Belanger's observations of the two media stars' simultaneous visits to Montreal to meet with their followers. The film celebrates the resistance shown by a coalition of the unsubmissive: gays, transgendered people, youth, battered women, psychiatric patients, abortion activists and women who have had abortions.