Tom Perlmutter
Chairman of the National Film Board

1. As a young man working in publishing in London, I took a girlfriend on a first date to an all-night showing of Russian silent films. (Those images of Dovzhenko, Pudovkin and Eisenstein still haunt me.) Our second date was to the old Highgate cemetery to pay homage to William Friese-Greene, one of the inventors of cinematography. (The new Highgate cemetery housed the remains of such upstarts as Karl Marx.) Curiously, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would have a career in film.

2. My father was a butcher on the Main in Montreal and my mother a hairdresser. As a kid I used to go occasionally to the abattoir with my father to watch the slaughterers at work, and I often had to spend Saturday afternoons at the beauty salon, where my mother’s clients gushed over my (then) thick auburn locks. Today I don’t eat meat and I have no hair.

3. We left Hungary when I was six months old, escaping across the border to Slovakia and eventually making our way to Vienna. Twenty years later I went back on my own. From the moment I arrived I was overwhelmed by an intense sense of déjà vu. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know the country; I had never been to Budapest. As evening approached, I finally understood what was happening. It was the language. I had been brought up in Canada but surrounded by Hungarian speakers. Now I was completely and totally immersed in Hungarian. I understood then the deep importance of language, and subsequently it gave me a great sympathy for Quebec.