For the first time in the history of Quebec cinema a local film featuring a predominantly black cast has hit theatres.

Directed by Haitian born Montrealer Jepthé Bastien, the gangster movie Exit 67 is set in St. Michel, a poor, multi-ethnic neighborhood in northeastern Montreal with a large Haitian population.

Bastien decided to make Exit 67 after his nephew, a member of a street gang, was murdered.

“When my nephew died, it hit my like a brick,” says the director. “I wanted to figure out what had happened.”

Although the film is a traditional gangster tale, the director also explores the numerous social issues facing Montreal’s growing Haitian community, such as unemployment and family breakdown.

“These kids are a product of their environment. Many are poor. They have been failed by family and the system,” says the director. “In Quebec, we don’t really like to acknowledge that [the Haitian offspring] were born here. They are the ‘other.’ But they are our children. We need to take care of them and we don’t. They are simply clientele for the penal system.”

In the film, eight-year-old Jecko watches his white father bludgeon his Haitian mother to death while she sleeps. After his father is sent to prison, Jecko moves through more than a dozen foster homes. An angry, poorly educated adolescent desperate to belong, Jecko becomes easy prey for a low-level gang leader who promises to teach the young man to become a ‘lion.’

Bastien, who comes from a middle-class family and is well educated, believes that he has been discriminated against in the tight-knit, predominantly white Quebec film and television community.

“Making this film is a dream of yesterday,” says the director, who now lives in Montreal but initially left Quebec in the 1990s because he felt he couldn’t practice his profession. “We pretend we are not racist in Quebec. [But] there is a little clique that owns everything.”

This past July at the Los Angeles premiere of his feature The Trotsky, Montreal director Jacob Tierney told a La Presse reporter that he believed Quebec cinema was insular and didn’t reflect the cultural diversity of the province.

Calling the industry “white, white, white,” Tierney went on to say that anglophones and immigrants are ignored and seem to have no place in the Quebecois dream.

Although defended in some quarters, Tierney was accused of Quebec bashing. Bastien got full support from this province’s film financing body, SODEC, to make his film.

“In 2008, I got a call from SODEC,” says Bastien. “They told me that 40 projects were submitted and four were accepted for funding – and two of them they believed absolutely had to be made. One of those two was Exit 67.”

Despite SODEC’s enthusiasm, Bastien remains cautiously optimistic. He’s had opportunities in Quebec before that ultimately didn’t lead to much.

“I fear that despite the fact that this door is open, I will have to start over again each time I make a film. I guess what will prove it to me that things are opening up is being able to make a second film.”

Exit 67 is produced by Les Productions Ajoupà, and distributed by Atopia Distribution.