MONTREAL—A dozen new immigrants assembled last week to view a film depicting an Inuk man separated from family in 1952 and forcibly relocated to Quebec City from Baffin Island to be treated for tuberculosis.

The audience was united only by their recent arrivals in Canada and their participation in government-run language classes to learn or improve French.

They had even less in common with Tivii, the film’s Inuktitut-speaking protagonist played by Natar Ungalaaq in the 2008 Genie-award-winning fictional film Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life).

But when the movie about dislocation and human connection ended, when the lights came on and director Benoît Pilon emerged to answer questions, Ghazaal Salehian was one of the first to speak up.

“There is a connection between me and Tivii,” she said in French. “Both of us are immigrants — his was a forced immigration, but I decided to immigrate myself . . . I was shocked, like Tivii.”

Such reactions are recurring themes in a new program that uses French-language Quebec films as a teaching tool for new immigrants. The goal is to instruct the language while introducing newcomers to the province’s distinct culture and history.

Film industry group Cinema Québec and Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, the provincially run library and archives, are showing six films this fall and winter dealing with issues as varied as Montreal Canadiens hockey legend Maurice Richard, the imposition of the War Measures Act in Quebec in 1970, and the place of the Catholic Church in province.

“There are always connections that people draw with the countries they come from,” said Ségolène Roederer, general manager of Québec Cinema.

When they screened the 2015 film La passion d’Augustine (The Passion of Augustine) a Syrian woman who wears the hijab saw her own struggle in the character of a nun obliged to remove her habit and wear civilian clothes.

“She said that it really spoke to her because of all the questions about veiled women. For her it was an enormous issue and that scene showed and explained it very well and helped her to explain what she felt,” said Roederer.

The program also introduces newcomers to social or political issues they might be confronted with in Quebec, such as the sovereignty movement or why provincial lawmakers debate and vote on laws beneath an oversized crucifix.

“It’s much easier with people gathered around a film. It’s a common language that reaches people,” said Hélène Dubuc, who runs the library’s music and film section.

After this week’s screening, Marie-Pierre Gadoua, a trained anthropologist employed by the library as a social mediator, recounted having watched the film with a group of Inuit from northern Quebec who were in Montreal for specialized medical treatment.

“They see themselves in the film even today,” Gadoua said. “I’ve seen a number of people like Tivii here in Montreal. It’s too loud for them, there’s no horizon, the food isn’t good. That hasn’t changed.”

Pilon, the director, said that the film’s message about the fragility and value of language and culture also resonates with French-speaking Quebecers living in English-speaking North America.

The desire to protect and propagate the French language is also the goal behind the language classes that brought these new immigrants to the film screening.

Amira Othman, a pathologist from Egypt, left her country after the Arab Spring uprising in 2011, first for France, then for the United States. After her immigration claim was approved, the single mother of two children came to Toronto but was lured to Montreal by its lower cost of living.

The moment in the film that most spoke to her was when Tivii meets a young Inuit boy from northern Quebec at the hospital who translates for him and finally allows him how to speak and be heard. She felt similar frustrations when she arrived in France speaking only Arabic and English.

“I couldn’t understand what they were saying most of the time and they couldn’t understand me either.”

Othman is now trying to balance her five-day-a-week French-language courses against the needs of her children and the equivalency tests she will have to undergo if she wants to practice medicine in Canada.

She has given up many things in leaving Egypt, among them the nearly two decades she spent training and working as a doctor. But she is chasing a simple dream.

“I didn’t immigrate for money. I immigrated to have freedom, to have a better lifestyle, to have freedom of speech,” Othman said.

Salehian worked as an English teacher in Iran and was completing a doctorate when she, her husband and their son were approved to come to Canada. She said that she began taking French-language courses before leaving Iran but was still not prepared for her arrival in Quebec eight months ago.

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The clothes were different, as were the stores, the people, their customs and even the sound of the Quebec-accent, which was nothing like what she had been studying at home.

In this way, too, she empathized with the Inuit character in the film, who touches trees and drives in cars with a sense of disbelief, who wonders about the mysteries of running water and who is unable to understand or make himself understood.

“When I saw Tivii, I remembered myself in the airport,” Salehian said. “I was like a deaf person. I was shocked and I couldn’t speak a word.”

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