LIVERMORE FALLS – Ben Levine’s new documentary on the repression and renaissance of New England’s French-Canadian culture will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 7, at Murray Hall, 69 Main St.

“Reveil: Waking Up French” is an epic story of New England’s largest minority, why they settled here and what happened to them. Levine, who will be present at the showing, invites the audience to discuss their ideas and emotions immediately following the film.

The film explores why the French-Canadians were an anomaly to “melting pot” America, preserving their language and culture long after most others had lost the heritage connection.

There are more than 2 million (30 to 40 percent of Maine’s population) descendants of these immigrants from Quebec in Maine today, 500,000 of whom still speak French. Heritage language retention and bilinguism were once regarded as a detriment by educators compared to today’s increasing global market.

But research sociologist, Sandra Kouritzin, author of Facets of Language Loss, shows that loss of a heritage language at any age means disconnecting from a deep part of one’s self that cannot be translated into another language. According to Yvon Labbe of the Franco-American Center at the University of Maine, language loss on such a scale “leads to a sense of powerlessness, shame, and eventually to whole culture becoming invisible.”

Five years in the making, the documentary has a unique structure which Levine calls an “analytical documentary” that tries to describe and account for the “emotional history of a people, (and that looks for) examples of cultural and personal emergence that can lead the culture to a renaissance.”

According to Labbe, it is “a powerful and long overdue portrait of a people fighting for a basic right to be who they are.”

For more information, contact Ben Levine at Watching Place, P.O. Box 905, Rockland, ME 04841; 594-9988; or [email protected].