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The Free Ones

2020 film directed by Nicolas Lévesque

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 28, 2025
Entity authorityQ100145755
Source-derived summary

The Free Ones (French: Les Libres) is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Nicolas Lévesque and released in 2020. An expansion of his 2015 short film Interview with a Free Man (Entrevue avec un homme libre), which was named by the Toronto International Film Festival as one of the Canada's Top Ten short films in 2015, the film is a portrait of several ex-convicts who are readjusting to life as free men with jobs at a sawmill in Roberval, Quebec.

The film premiered at the 2020 Montreal International Documentary Festival.

The film received two Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards, for Best Cinematography in a Documentary (Jean-Philippe Archibald) and Best Editing in a Documentary (Natacha Dufaux).

Editorial summary

“The Free Ones” enters the record as 2020 film directed by Nicolas Lévesque. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Free, Ones and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2020, 2015—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Free, Ones and film.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“The Free Ones” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Free, Ones and film provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q100145755. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2015.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Free Ones”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Free Ones primary sources, The Free Ones archive and Free research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Free Ones”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from The Free Ones” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.