Alias Will James

This is a very intelligent documentary film by Jacques Godbout, a real master of the genre in French Canada (and also a famous writer). It tells us the story of Ernest Duffaut, a French canadian who dream to be an American cow-boy. So he goes west and become an important writer of cow-boy novels, lives in a ranch. Godbout retraces that story and makes a parallel with some recent French Canadians who's doing exactly the same thing. It's a film of the lost of an identity and a culture to replace it with a false name and a culture who's not, by essence, their own. But it's also a film about dreams come true. The movie is simply warm hearted and we learn to love Will James or Ernest Duffaut. Some Will James novels were made into western movies, like 1971 Shootout, with Gregory Peck.